Audacity looks really bad with Breeze Dark + menu bar resizing

[vincintosh]

Hello everyone, I’m running Audacity 2.3.3-alpha-Nov 22 2019 on Kde Plasma 5.17.4 on Arch, installed from repos.

I’m using the Breeze Dark theme and been using dark themes for months now, but I’ve never been able to make Audacity look decent. I finally decided to post here and ask for some help, maybe I’m missing something.

Here’s how audacity looks with the default theme
https://ibb.co/TksrD4j

As you can see it looks terrible with those dark roll down menus (I mean, the ones you use to select the input/output device, record frequency etc…). Is there any way to have them look decent (i.e. the same color as the background)?

Here’s how it looks instead with the dark theme
https://ibb.co/5WKMtL3

which I don’t really like, but it’s a bit more consistent. Even with this theme enabled, it still doesn’t show the menus you use for i/o device selecting properly, in fact, as you can see, they are too “thin” while the buttons look like they need more vertical space. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to find an option to vertically resize menu bars. Is there any known way to make them look more properly (at least with the text fully readable)?

Thank you in advance for your time.

[steve]

Here’s how audacity looks with the default theme

I agree, Light theme Audacity + Dark theme Desktop = Not a good look.
No surprise there

Here’s how it looks instead with the dark theme

That looks much better to me.

If you are really bothered by appearances, you could create a custom theme. See: Missing features - Audacity Support

it still doesn’t show the menus you use for i/o device selecting properly,

That’s a different issue. The problem there is that Audacity does not yet fully support high dpi displays. Your Desktop environment is using font scaling, so the drop down menu fonts are large, but unfortunately the Device Toolbar does not scale for high dpi, so you are looking at a large font through a small “letterbox hole”. This is already logged on the bug-tracker.
The (not very good) workaround is to reduce the display dpi so that scaled up fonts are not required. Personally I don’t bother with the workaround and put up with that bit of ugly - at least the text is properly visible when the device menu is clicked on.

[vincintosh]

Here’s how it looks instead with the dark theme

That looks much better to me.

Yep that definitely looks much better but not yet satisfying for me… If I have time, I could try this self made themes method, I didn’t know about that, thanks

That’s a different issue. The problem there is that Audacity does not yet fully support high dpi displays. Your Desktop environment is using font scaling, so the drop down menu fonts are large, but unfortunately the Device Toolbar does not scale for high dpi, so you are looking at a large font through a small “letterbox hole”. This is already logged on the bug-tracker.
The (not very good) workaround is to reduce the display dpi so that scaled up fonts are not required. Personally I don’t bother with the workaround and put up with that bit of ugly - at least the text is properly visible when the device menu is clicked on.

Yes, it’s definitely not worth it, reducing the dpi. I don’t even have such a HiDPI display actually. I have a ultra wide 25" 2560x1080p and my internal laptop display is a 15" standard 1080p but anyway I’ll rather wait that the bug gets fixed