I hope this is appropriate for the forum- I consider it a “quality of life improvement”, and I know that’s generally acceptable. So here it is…
For those of you who appreciate small aesthetic tweaks that can also serve a functional purpose, I wanted to point out qubes-label-tt by @alimirjamali
I know that aesthetic tweaks like this aren’t for everyone, and there’s definitely a point where one can go overboard with customizations, but the customized colors alone are great for quickly making sense of a large number of VMs. This is especially true for those with color perception disabilities
I have problems perceiving many shades of some common colors, due to genetic faults, so only 3 or 4 colors in the “stock” Qubes colors were really useable for me - half of them are indistinguishable to my eyes. With well over 20 VMs and half a dozen distinct security domains, Qubes Manager became a really difficult experience until I added some custom colors (and icons, in a few cases)
There are some caveats/edge-cases with that can cause occasional weirdness, depending on how you set up the colors and icons but they’re mostly documented and minor
For example, one of my color/icon combos makes the text for that particular VM seem invisible in the Updates window unless it’s highlighted/selected. Doesn’t bother me, and I think I can fix it, by changing the color
I also forgot to assign colors to some of the icons, which caused some (non-fatal) errors in the monitoring scripts I use
Aside from those two, it’s been seamless and took only 10 minutes to set up (plus 10 minutes searching for a couple of unlicensed icons- don’t tell the copyright police!)
I added a few of those unlicensed/custom icons to my configuration, in addition to the Creative Commons ones
One example being a Windows icon, for the Windows templates and appVMs I have, which in my use-case, don’t actually have separate domains.
I hope this makes it upstream in 2025, I think I read that it’s just a matter of having the time to do so, and there is a GitHub issue tracking the work
Kudos to @alimirjamali for working on this and other UX features that I think may often go unnoticed or under-appreciated