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Please don’t theme our apps

stopthemingmy.app

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Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#61

Post by j-james »

nine_k wrote: post #58
_2paq wrote: post #38

https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1433088460655452162 I don't know why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment (Cinnamon, Solus, PopOS etc) but at this point, it's pretty clear that GNOME/GTK developers don't care one bit about them. They want to control their apps and their ecosystem and don't want anyone telling them what to do. GNOME/GTK is heading toward Google's ope…

> why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment Because the licensing status of Qt was for a long time somehow murky [1]. By 2000 when it was GPL'd many now-current desktop environments have already been born. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#History_of_Qt

There also aren't any Qt bindings for C, to my knowledge.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#62

Post by _2paq »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #57
_2paq wrote: post #38

https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1433088460655452162 I don't know why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment (Cinnamon, Solus, PopOS etc) but at this point, it's pretty clear that GNOME/GTK developers don't care one bit about them. They want to control their apps and their ecosystem and don't want anyone telling them what to do. GNOME/GTK is heading toward Google's ope…

I recently switched from KDE to Upstream GNOME because I was tired of long pending bugs(e.g. Dolphin/Baloo going rogue) while new features keep getting added. I was surprised to find how refined GNOME is, everything just works. I understood that my misconceptions of GNOME was because of how it was integrated in the distros especially inconsistent theming and this letter states why it is so. I can confidently recommen…

It would obviously be easier for GNOME to ship an apparently more refined experience when customization possibilities are negligible and basic features are missing.

One can't even change the fonts of GNOME out of the box without first installing Tweak Tool and even then, you can't change the font of GNOME Shell itself. If you dare customize the CSS to change it, you're implementing "hacks". I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to change fonts was removed from GNOME and GTK.

Not to mention that GNOME devs seem to think that volume control slider isn't required in their music app and GNOME file picker still doesn't have thumbnails. So yeah, basic features are missing.

https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

Then again, it's probably a useless debate at this point since everything is subjective. I'm confident that one could come up with a desktop environment with windows turned upside down and inside out with colors changing randomly every second and many people would still like it and call it "polished" and "refined".

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#63

Post by lavabiopsy »

pavon wrote: post #39

Gnome and GTK are designed with themes as a core feature, and have been for ages. This is like refusing to support application menus (vs window menus) when they became a core part of Gnome. I personally may not use them, but it is part of the system UI guidelines, and if I want my app to integrate with the rest of the system, I need to support it. Discussing what makes themes difficult to support - how to design them…

>Gnome and GTK are designed with themes as a core feature, and have been for ages.

I don't know where you heard this, but to my knowledge this hasn't been true. GNOME 3 didn't really support "themes" proper, for a while now the only supported theme is Adwaita. It technically did support re-styling with CSS, and you could load a different CSS using the tweak tool, but this was always considered unsupported -- if you loaded a theme that had bad color contrast or makes the text otherwise unreadable or broke any number of other things that a theme could break, then that was on you. The option was appropriately hidden in the tweak tool so non-technical users wouldn't accidentally load a theme that breaks their desktop in an unrecoverable way.

>Discussing what makes themes difficult to support - how to design themes that don't break good apps, and how to design apps that don't break with good themes - would be far more productive

Respectfully, it wouldn't. This has already been discussed quite a bit and the problem is that if you want the full power of CSS theming then the apps will always break, because the theme can literally change anything anywhere. There is no way to design a theme or app that works correctly here, it's like trying to take a random CSS file from one website and then applying it to another random website. Sure maybe it might change some things, but most likely it won't really work because none of the class names will match up. The only way "theming" really can be done reliably is to do it in small controlled ways, e.g. I believe there is some discussion of allowing changes to the accent color similar to what Windows and Mac do.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#64

Post by lavabiopsy »

_2paq wrote: post #62
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched from KDE to Upstream GNOME because I was tired of long pending bugs(e.g. Dolphin/Baloo going rogue) while new features keep getting added. I was surprised to find how refined GNOME is, everything just works. I understood that my misconceptions of GNOME was because of how it was integrated in the distros especially inconsistent theming and this letter states why it is so. I can confidently recommen…

It would obviously be easier for GNOME to ship an apparently more refined experience when customization possibilities are negligible and basic features are missing. One can't even change the fonts of GNOME out of the box without first installing Tweak Tool and even then, you can't change the font of GNOME Shell itself. If you dare customize the CSS to change it, you're implementing "hacks". I wouldn't be surprised if…

In some situations, changing the font could absolutely considered a hack -- this can break apps in subtle ways by messing with the spacing and sizing of elements, and it gets worse if you designed your app for some specific form factor(s). It's perfectly reasonable for an app developer to say they only support certain fonts. I'm sorry if that's disappointing to hear, but every app developer cannot be expected to test their apps with every single font in existence that someone wants to use.

The default apps that come with GNOME are designed to be simple and unobtrusive. They're not trying to be a Photoshop or a Final Cut Pro. If you don't like them you are of course free to install and use some other alternative, for example KDE apps should run just fine inside GNOME, and vice versa. I don't have any comments on the file chooser, anything we say is flogging a dead horse. You can search some previous discussions on reddit for all the times that's been discussed (unproductively) over the last 15 years.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#65

Post by lavabiopsy »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #43
ruph123 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which other mainstream operating systems allow to apply global themes?

Windows, up until at least XP, had deep support for restyling. But this is beside the point: what drew me to Linux in the first place was that it empowered people to remix all the aspects and encouraged people to share these remixes (or “rices” as they’re called on r/unixporn: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pfue6h/gnome_2_fo... )

You can still do that, but hopefully you understand that by doing so, you are in unsupported territory.

Also, I would suggest avoiding the use of that term as it comes from a racial slur aimed at Asians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#66

Post by lavabiopsy »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
gammalost wrote: post #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

It's because the GNOME devs (which, I think, includes the GTK ones) have an extremely protective position towards "their" product, which clashes with the open source spirit. Theming ("branding", as they refer to) is, in a sense, just the core of their marketing campaign. This is not just ideology - they do try also in practical ways to prevent third party devs from customization. For a background of how horrible the…

I'm not sure why you're saying that's antisocial, it was completely true then and it's still somewhat true now. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own subtle differences, if you want to have a good experience for any one of them you'll have to target that specific desktop and test for it. Placing the blame for this solely on GNOME doesn't make any sense, when each of those groups all have their own product that they're trying to promote.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#67

Post by lavabiopsy »

_2paq wrote: post #38

https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1433088460655452162 I don't know why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment (Cinnamon, Solus, PopOS etc) but at this point, it's pretty clear that GNOME/GTK developers don't care one bit about them. They want to control their apps and their ecosystem and don't want anyone telling them what to do. GNOME/GTK is heading toward Google's ope…

Please don't jump to these baseless conclusions based on a misinterpretation of one twitter post. The issue here is with libadwaita, not with GTK, and if you actually read the gitlab issue chain by that person then you will see that progress is being made: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/259

>It's a mistake to consider GNOME/GTK as a community project.

You're getting this wrong -- GNOME is very much a community project, but it's one that happens to be heavily driven by designers. Maybe this is unusual for an open source project? The general point with the request is that you can't just try to make a desktop that re-uses some GNOME components while also throwing out everything their designers did, the end result there is that users have a bad time. This is not about making someone conform to anyone's way, this is about distros working with app developers to provide the best possible experience for users. Switching toolkits is not really going to fix anything here, you will run into the same issues with any other toolkit if you try to restyle apps in ways that were unsupported and unintended by the app developer.

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#68

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

lavabiopsy wrote: post #65
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows, up until at least XP, had deep support for restyling. But this is beside the point: what drew me to Linux in the first place was that it empowered people to remix all the aspects and encouraged people to share these remixes (or “rices” as they’re called on r/unixporn: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pfue6h/gnome_2_fo... )

You can still do that, but hopefully you understand that by doing so, you are in unsupported territory. Also, I would suggest avoiding the use of that term as it comes from a racial slur aimed at Asians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

I didn’t realize that latter part, sorry

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#69

Post by lavabiopsy »

thomasahle wrote: post #18

When I used to write apps for Gnome I would always test with all the available style sheets. Why would you test with just one? At least try an inverted (dark) and a low contrast style.

I think it's been suggested for a while to test with the default themes (Adwaita, Adwaita dark, High Contrast) but everything else is unsupported. I don't see how you could test with every stylesheet available when a search seems to turn up over 1000 of them out there: https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135

Re: Please don’t theme our apps

#70

Post by lavabiopsy »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #68
lavabiopsy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do that, but hopefully you understand that by doing so, you are in unsupported territory. Also, I would suggest avoiding the use of that term as it comes from a racial slur aimed at Asians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

I didn’t realize that latter part, sorry

No biggie, I've seen lots of people in car modding communities who use that term casually and don't know where it came from or why an Asian person would find it rude, so I just try to educate people :)
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