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Please don’t theme our apps

stopthemingmy.app

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Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#41

Post by suby »

sp332 wrote: post #31
loudtieblahblah wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just bc you wrote something doesn't give you the right to dictate how I use it on my personal machine.

Again, this letter is not aimed at end users. "If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us."

This would absolutely impact end users when they can no longer find custom themes through their distro of choice.

It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#42

Post by the_other »

anoncake wrote: post #2

> GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Bugs are bad, yes. > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. That is not a problem if you use icons for the purpose they are intended for. > Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Good. My computer is not your billboard. Co…

If you develop for a system which permits theming, you have to include that use case in your design. You can’t complain about users making use of system features when you develop for that system.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#43

Post by Zenst »

cuddlecake wrote: post #17
anoncake wrote: post #2

> GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Bugs are bad, yes. > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. That is not a problem if you use icons for the purpose they are intended for. > Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Good. My computer is not your billboard. Co…

Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric. The author presents valid and sensible issues with the state of theming on the GNOME platform. And the overarching topic is essentially User Experience. Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not…

It's not so egocentric if you factor in the fashion aspect. Not everybody wears the same matching clothes.

Then more crucial aspects of ability - such as eyesight being a major one. Some people can't see some colours that well, some need larger fonts. Things like that in which theme's are the saviour and for many a developer - how they cater for disability usage.

Sure some theme's can break the UI, but to blame the user, which is the case here - now that's egocentric IMHO.

As for branding - how many users care about that?

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#44

Post by Asooka »

anoncake wrote: post #2

> GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Bugs are bad, yes. > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. That is not a problem if you use icons for the purpose they are intended for. > Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Good. My computer is not your billboard. Co…

And let's not forget that you need theming support so your OS can accommodate people with different vision requirements. So you can have a low-contrast theme, and a high-contrast theme, and a red-green colour-blind theme and so on. And let's not forget people who need a large text theme. Remember 15 years ago when we were so proud of GTK for being able to dynamically adjust for all these things (as opposed to Windows's half-assed support)? Remember when user experience was more important than designer vision? Remember when we all solved the problem of separating the data from the presentation? Remember when GUIs were written with a particular look in mind, but could adjust for various themes?

There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.

Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#45

Post by elagost »

This is insane.

The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever).

Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#46

Post by turbinerneiter »

random45345 wrote: post #15

The whole letter sounds weird when talking about free software. Software freedom main benefit is that the user can change the software. Theming it is probably the most accessible form of modification and should be celebrated. Asking not to theme is contrary to the free software ethos itself. The situation is even more tricky as what is being modified is not even the software itself but the system dependencies. Essent…

This isn't about the user theming. It's about distros theming.

There currently is a growing conflict between upstream developers and distributions, because some of their interactions and dependencies bare badly managed.

For example, upstream maintainers see an influx of bug reports and angry users due to bugs, where the distributions are at fault. Sources for this can be changes to the code that the distributions make for various reasons like backwards compatibility, themes that break user interfaces or simply outdated packages or missing backports.

The GNOME upstream maintainers all are having their ass hanging out on a public gitlab repo, while some of the distributors, who break stuff, are very hard to find, with sometimes ancient bugtrackers.

I trust that the community will find a way to update their relationships and solve these issues, but it starts with seeing what's going wrong and where we have bad incentive structures.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#47

Post by taosx »

As an end user I never had any of the mentioned users. On some rare occasions when the state of my distro was probably too unique, I had some problems, but that's why I use linux.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#49

Post by anoncake »

grandinj wrote: post #40
brokenkebab wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent correctly notes that theming is a valid feature of the platform, and asking essentially for ignoring the feature because of brand issues sounds ridiculous. It maybe 'unhelpful', but sometimes we just express our opinions here, not running consultancy services. It's called commentary section for a reason.

Themeing is not a valid or supported feature. It's a hack that uses some facilities in GTK that were not intended for that purpose.

That was the case in the early days of GTK3, but I don't think it is anymore.

If GTK3 still does not support theming, that explains why theming causes issues. In which case it would be better to implement proper theming support because stopping distributions from theming clearly doesn't work.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#50

Post by coleifer »

The gnome/gtk team introduces breaking changes to the styles and themes all the time. I think this is misplaced outrage.

One of the things I like most about gtk apps is the ability to theme them to achieve a uniform look across all my apps. I would rather use a slightly less functional gtk app than a qt/kde thing for this reason.

Users who care enough to mess with themes by necessity accept that sometimes things may need some tweaking. Most popular themes are on gh and have responsive maintainers who are invested in their themes looking good/uniform. The burden should be placed on the theme maintainers and the users who choose to use non-default configuration, rather than disabling themes on an ad-hoc basis.

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