Dual Qube Color

[logoerthiner1]

How to file a helpful issue

The problem you're addressing (if any)

The current Qubes color palette is limited, which could be a problem for people with lots of qubes.

As is mentioned by @unman in #2523, minimum number of colors is preferred as color carries critical security information.

May be related: #7736 #6752

The solution you'd like

Design dual colors for each qube. A shape in Office has fill color and border color, and just like that, using a supplementary color for a qube can be useful to distinguish windows for different qube.

The original color of a qube remains to be the main color of windows and icons; however the supplementary color can become the color of some decorations of window (for example a line across the title bar; or dash dots patterns on the edge of windows) or icon (most part of icon is in main color but a part of icon becomes the supplementary color)

I have noticed that system qubes have their special icon - with a deeper colored rectangle on the side of cute qube icon. Such colored rectangle could be specified a different color, for example, to distinguish system qubes and working qubes and template qubes.

The value to a user, and who that user might be

A user having many VM with the same color - for example I have many different red qubes and different yellow qubes.

[vulnlol]

Colored Qubes emblem's for the VM's are stored as icon images so there would need to be a way to adjust the color's of the icons dynamically.

[alimirjamali]

I have a complete solution for this issue (Multiple Qube Color effects).

It consists of the following parts:

1. Improvements to qubesimgconverter library. New effects (Overlay, Anti-aliased Thin & Thick borders, Marker effect, Invert Effects. Also other useful utilities such as alpha-compositor, rescale, resize canvas, ...). Screenshots.
2. Fix for qubesappmenus library to apply the above effects to individual qubes based on specific feature key. Screenshots.
3. Fix for icon-reciver of qubes-gui-daemon to apply the effects to running application icons in panel area. Screenshots.

This has been under test for 5 months and has been shared with community on forum. I believe few forum members are already using it. It is fully forward & backward compatible. The effects are very useful in my opinion to improve overall functionality and security by allowing user to easily identify the application based on color + effect combination.

The only issue is that together with unittests, it is roughly 1000 lines of code which might be time-consuming for review.

[marmarek]

@marmarta ^

[marmarta]

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. That brings a lot of colors into the mix, and while some more colors is a good idea, I'm afraid here we can get into a situation where it's easier for people to accidentally have really hard-to-distinguish qube colors/app combinations...

[alimirjamali]

I'm afraid here we can get into a situation where it's easier for people to accidentally have really hard-to-distinguish qube colors/app combinations...

The screenshot below would give a better representation of color/app combination. The icons are all Firefox. The 1st two are only tinted (current effect). The 3rd and the 4th have thin borders. The 5th has a thick border. The 6th is overlay on label color. The 7th is untouched (belongs to heavily trusted personal qube). And the last is Inverted (belongs to untrusted).