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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#71

Post by phkahler »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #26

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose). That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of…

>> You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose

Not sure what that even means. The majority are not the Gnome developers, and many users will just adapt to whatever they're fed, even if it's worse.

>> That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming.

No. People aren't complaining about a lack of consistency or a lack of theming (some do). They are complaining about a shitty design where the elements are consistently nonsensical and harder to understand than past version of the same.

Top-down means a few people who are at "the top" think they know better. Not that they're great designers either - they are copying stupid trends that other "design" people came up with. This stuff is complained about on all OSes these days. It's not a vocal minority either, and you can tell because nobody complained that GTK was falling beind and needed to update to a modern "flat" design.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#72

Post by capableweb »

azinman2 wrote: post #42

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be…

Easy for someone who works at Apple to say "just throw money at the problem" while there is so much more to consider. Design as a workflow for Open Source design (as in UI/UX) hasn't even been worked on that much. Ideally, open source contributors work on projects because they care about it, and want to improve it. I'm not sure how many designers are using GTK applications day-to-day to care enough about it to start contributing. There is a learning curve as well on how to contribute to these large projects.

It'd be great if it could be solved with just one pass of design work and then it's done, but I'm afraid the task is much bigger than that, and "big wig design firms" are expensive, so are design people as well. Not to mention the other problems around that.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#73

Post by jandrese »

jabbany wrote: post #44
von_lohengramm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse than anything else.

This. The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) displays is painful.

Over 2/3 of regular users are still using 1080p[1]. If your design looks bad on FHD then it looks bad to most people.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#74

Post by phkahler »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks . And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They did…

Getting rid of themes and sticking to "one true design" doesn't mean "use a shitty flat design".

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#75

Post by jeroenhd »

malermeister wrote: post #34
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks . And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They did…

The don't theme my app people were complaining about their bug trackers being full of theme-related issues. Instead of just setting up a filter rule in their tracker so they could ignore those issues, they decided to go super draconian and remove theming for the entire desktop. That disproportionate response to what comes down to an organizational shortcoming on their end made people upset, I'm not sure what they exp…

Note that they don't care about the themes their end users pick, though. You can theme your app just fine. They just want operating systems using their software (with their logos, trademarks and support links) to stop shipping their custom themes by default.

They just don't want Canonical or Fedora to ship a theme that makes all applications that didn't come bundled look like shit. If you like the Windows 95 Hotdog Stand theme, you can configure that and everybody probably agrees that that's great. If you inflict that pain upon yourself, that's your problem.

The current "solution" to themes breaking applications is to just not follow the system theme any longer. Everything gets packaged with a hardcoded theme in a sandboxed environment and you'll just have to live with that.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#76

Post by nyanpasu64 »

> The only issue with it is that font rendering looks horrific, but that might just be my machine.

This is because GTK4 enables pixel/scaling-independent fractional vertical positioning, even with hinting enabled. There's a long (somewhat ongoing) discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787, though I haven't followed the last few months of discussion.

Even though GTK4 aims to achieve scale-independent layout, the 4 horizontal/vertical positions still produce a bit of judder, and fonts do not scale smoothly (even with bilinear interpolation) with hinting enabled, and (unless fixed) there are rendering issues due to failing to clear the texture atlas properly: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4322

Interestingly there's a proposal to switch GTK4 fonts to SDF-style rendering. This is somewhat like what Qt Quick 2 implemented already (and KDE turns off and reverts to FreeType rendering, to make QML apps mimic Qt Widgets font rendering more): https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/03/20/rendering-text-w... However, I looked at https://github.com/behdad/glyphy and it seems to implement vector-based SDFs, instead of earlier texture-based SDF/MSDFs used by Valve games and Qt Quick.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#77

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

HeckFeck wrote: post #22
mholt wrote: post #7

The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons…

This is why I have reverted to the CLI whenever possible. There's something deeply assuring knowing that I don't have to relearn my whole workflow every few months when the trends change. ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent. All I want is to get work done the way I want, and I've found the CLI is increasingly the path of least resistance.

I regret to inform you that the latest release of `find` has been renamed to [magnifying glass emoji].

For example,

    # Find directories the old way.
    find . -type d

    # The cool new way!
    [magnifying glass emoji] . -[keyboard] [folder emoji]
Edit: HN appears to strip emojis, so my new edited comment doesn't pack the same punch.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#78

Post by jeroenhd »

MereInterest wrote: post #37
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

Backstory: https://stopthemingmy.app

Wow, that's definitely something. Implying that tinkering with the low level aspects of a system are acceptable, but don't you dare apply a different stylesheet, because adjusting colors is delicate work that shouldn't ever be done by anybody but the developer.

I agree with the key points though, which is that distros need to stop messing with themes unless they can validate that all applications work with custom themes.

They bear no ill will against users who download or make their own theme.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#79

Post by Schroedingersat »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

But at least they spread out all the unnecessary fluff elements and then made the clickable portions tiny and close together

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#80

Post by phkahler »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

Backstory: https://stopthemingmy.app

Getting rid of themes is a decision distinct from that of choosing the one true theme. Going with FLAT was a poor choice and is what the current discussion is about. If there is any irony it's that more people will want to change the theme now, since the default is worse than before.
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