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Please don’t theme our apps

stopthemingmy.app

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Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#151

Post by sjwright »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #127
sjwright wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if the end users want the ability to theme their system—if the software they run is not designed to be themed, then it's not designed to be themed.

It doesn't matter if the software is designed to be themed. If I want it to be themed, I'll theme it anyway, and if I can't, it means the software and the platform it's running on is garbage, and I'll go find a different one.

Nobody is saying that you must not apply your favourite theme to whatever apps you like on your own computer. Not me, not the linked article.

If themes are so important to you, pick your app based on that criteria. If you think an app is garbage because it doesn’t theme well, fork it and write a better version yourself.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#152

Post by NeedMoreTea »

rangerpolitic wrote: post #106
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please read the letter all the way to the end I did thanks. "If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us ... However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory." Unsupported territory for choosing a distro that looks unusual, or applies theming, or for changing my own damn desktop icon?

It's unreasonable to expect a developer to support third-party modifications to the software--especially when that software and support are free.

To my view of the world, the reasonable grain of truth in the article is "Don't break our apps when you theme them to match distro". A perfectly reasonable request, and stance that most could support without caveat.

Which is then thoroughly buried by a point of view that feels the app is the only arbiter, and tries to justify that on consistency of brand, icons not representing what the developer wishes etc, and that even individual user customisation is a big favour - an unsupported edge case.

What of the users?

It's reasonable to expect an app to both allow, and to work correctly with any theming built into the platform or distro. Bugs may be on either side. I concede it's mainly the major platforms that have done most to take away choices here, so you can no longer download new iconsets - to transform everything into ST:TNG or whatever. Where a distro seeks to theme everything it's the one app that won't, for brand experience, or developer wishes - that now sticks out like a sore thumb.

That is to be regretted, as much as platforms removing ability to build a custom night mode or extreme low contrast theme, or even add some slight 3d back to Windows. It's the end user who loses out to a worse experience or usability each and every time.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#153

Post by anoncake »

faissaloo wrote: post #145
anoncake wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the contrary, I think GNOME allows people too much freedom Freedom is kind of the point of free software.

The ability to run what you want and modify what you want is different from design freedom.

Indeed. Keeping people from modifying their software affects only developers, keeping people from choosing a theme affects every user.

The ability to use what software you want, however, isn't much different from the ability to use what theme you want.

And ultimately, freedom is not specifically about running the software you want, or about modifying software, but about doing what you want.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#154

Post by quotemstr »

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…

> Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive

What's dismissive is this word "dismissive". Sometimes, a comment really is just a random low-effort personal swipe that don't engage with the substance of the subject. The GP did not write one of those comments. Instead, wrote a valid and substantive critique of the article, and you don't get to score rhetorical points by smearing that work with vague labels like "dismissive".

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#155

Post by darsnack »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #92
detaro wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It EXPLICITLY says that it does not talk about users changing things on their machines, but wants it to be something the user sets instead of a distro applying by default.

I may choose a distro that specifically looks a certain way - like the one that tries to look just like MacOS. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. Just as it's perfectly reasonable to regret consistency on a platform that doesn't have distros - as you may want to vary. "However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory." Unsupported terri…

If a distro is committed to modifying the style sheets to look like macOS, then it should be the distro’s responsibility to maintain the applications. Precisely because the distro market for Linux is so varied, it is hard for Gnome app developers to support all possible theme configurations.

Read the banner at the top of the page again. It doesn’t ask users to stop customizing, and it doesn’t say there shouldn’t be distros with custom theming. It just asks distros to stop shipping broken apps as a result of theming, and it asserts that if that’s the route you want to go, then you are on your own.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#156

Post by paulie_a »

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…

The author presents valid concerns, but the user is still higher priority.

The consistent theme across apps is more important than the developer's brand. Suggestions for a theme is useful, essentially ordering others how to use their app and theme should be outright dismissed.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#157

Post by quotemstr »

no_identd wrote: post #85
cuddlecake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The color change-inducing-friction complaint seems like an issue with lack of built-in theme sanity checking. There exist numerous partial solutions for this already, I'll link to the four best ones I know, albeit I wish someone would combine their approaches into one unified super-product: 1. http://www.hsluv.org/examples/ These palettes will absolutely NEVER clash. But they might have contrast issues. Which brings…

Thanks! Those are all super useful tools. I'm terrible at picking colors myself.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#158

Post by anoncake »

darsnack wrote: post #155
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may choose a distro that specifically looks a certain way - like the one that tries to look just like MacOS. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. Just as it's perfectly reasonable to regret consistency on a platform that doesn't have distros - as you may want to vary. "However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory." Unsupported terri…

If a distro is committed to modifying the style sheets to look like macOS, then it should be the distro’s responsibility to maintain the applications. Precisely because the distro market for Linux is so varied, it is hard for Gnome app developers to support all possible theme configurations. Read the banner at the top of the page again. It doesn’t ask users to stop customizing, and it doesn’t say there shouldn’t be d…

> it doesn’t say there shouldn’t be distros with custom theming.

Reading carefully between the lines, I think they actually do hint at that:

> Please don’t theme our apps

> This is why we ask respectfully that our applications not be themed.

> On a platform level, we believe GTK should stop forcing a single stylesheet on all apps by default.

> If you are a distribution who changes the system stylesheet and icons, please reconsider this decision.

> If you do, we ask that you please stop theming our apps.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#159

Post by anoncake »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #134
Asooka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The Web. It comes from the Web. Web development has this bullshit school of UI/UX design that prioritizes branding, dark patterns, and treating users like toddlers, at the expense of making the software functional and usable. Since we all get industr…

Yeah. People say one of the problems with free software is that its UX is designed by programmers rather than UX designers. Which makes sense, because UX designers should be able to design a good UX.

But not if they don't even try.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#160

Post by finchisko »

Electron app developers arise :). You don't have distro theming issues, do you? :D

And now seriously. If linux developers turn away from native ui libs (like KDE or GNOME), this might be one of the reasons. The other option is specifically ban disrespectful distros in the license terms.

I strongly believe in freedom (but not as GNU - absolute user freedom). Freedom IMO should be on both sides. If app developers doesn't want his/her app to be themed, then we should respect that. Our freedom is too look somewhere else to satisfy our need.

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