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Please don’t theme our apps

stopthemingmy.app

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#21
post #7
post #2

Telling me not to change my own icons is truly a bridge too far.

> 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. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

Yeah I changed my Firefox icon to go away from the POS it became, I'm totally going to blame any Firefox bugs on my icon. This page is ridiculous.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#22
I see their point. If they don't want their apps to pick up the system theme, I'd suggest that they provided a choice which theme to use, and bundled a good default theme, or several. For instance, GIMP and Inkscape do this, which I find very nice. GTK makes this easy to do.

Otherwise, I very much prefer when apps pick the system theme; on my desktop, both GTK and Qt apps look more or less the same, and I find this good from both aesthetic and ergonomic points of view.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#23

The article says clearly they are talking about distros that apply system wide themes without checking that all GTK applications still look good and not taking about people tinkering. Distros do this because it looks good in screenshots and give the system a unique flare, but it gives all these applications a bad image when people try them and they look terrible. Is the expectation that programs like geary should loo…

Apps should be designed with the goal of being themeable. Applications need to supply hints and avoid e.g. icons with baked in BG.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#24
post #14

This is the antithesis of open source and the things that drew me to Linux in the 90s and 00s

Exactly. WTF? If I release an open source app I would LOVE for you to theme it, mod it to your heart's content, and have a party. Send me a pull request if you come up with something cool looking.

>This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup.

The objection here is that distributions are building incompatible system themes that break standard GNOME expectations and make applications more confusing for users.

They're not talking about individuals messing with their systems.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#25
I don't use themes or a very heavily themed distro, so maybe I haven't seen egregious (mis)uses of theming.

That said, I absolutely agree when (if) it comes to theming actually breaking functionality (and the original developer having increased support burden because of it).

But asking distros not to style icons feels a step too far, in particular app icons. I appreciate when a distro tries to achieve visual consistency.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#26
post #14

This is the antithesis of open source and the things that drew me to Linux in the 90s and 00s

Exactly. WTF? If I release an open source app I would LOVE for you to theme it, mod it to your heart's content, and have a party. Send me a pull request if you come up with something cool looking.

Of course. If someone themes your app. But if distro xy creates a shiny new look that breaks your app, you probably are not so happy.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#27
I don't know why people are against this, it seems reasonable to me. If anyone goes beyond the intended usage (through themes or other modifications) then the developer shouldn't be resposible for supporting it

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#28
I'll add it to the list of reasons why Linux desktops have a long way to go before becoming mainstream. Brings back memories of jwz. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop...

please be careful clicking this link from HN. He doesn't like the HN crowd very much.

I understand the app developers, if you have to support end users because unexpected changes were made not even by the users themselves, it makes writing applications painful.

> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#30

Sure - as long as you provide dark/night mode.

Ah, the one size fits all approach. I guess the user better find a different app if he doesn't like the default themes. Lots of light and dark themes are sloppy and poorly designed.

Some of them have too high contrast which makes me see after effects of text everywhere on the screen. Some of them have poor contrast and require users to ruin their eyes. But no, let's assume everyone on Earth is fine with a single light and a single dark theme.

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