A Group of Independent Linux App Developers Has Asked Wider GNOME Community To 'Stop Theming' Its Apps (omgubuntu.co.uk) 179
The letter is addressed to the maintainers of Linux distributions who elect to ship custom GTK and icons themes by default in lieu of upstream defaults. From a report: By publicizing the issues they feel stem from the practice of "theming" it's hoped that distros and developers might work together to create a "healthier GNOME third party app ecosystem." So what's the actual rub here? It often feels like the ability to control how our desktop looks and works is part of some unwritten Linux constitution, one we're all secret adherents to.
But theming on the GNOME platform isn't all it seems. It's not without complications or compromises. As superficial as these changes might seem, usability is actually more than skin deep. Now, elephant in the room time: many leading Linux distros use custom GTK themes and icon sets as a way create a brand identity for themselves; an experience that feels uniquely their own. This includes Ubuntu (with Ambiance and Yaru), Linux Mint (with Mint-X), Pop OS (with Pop GTK) and Manjaro.
But theming on the GNOME platform isn't all it seems. It's not without complications or compromises. As superficial as these changes might seem, usability is actually more than skin deep. Now, elephant in the room time: many leading Linux distros use custom GTK themes and icon sets as a way create a brand identity for themselves; an experience that feels uniquely their own. This includes Ubuntu (with Ambiance and Yaru), Linux Mint (with Mint-X), Pop OS (with Pop GTK) and Manjaro.
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you fucktards?!
fuck you
Fuck off and die.
Gotta love the Linux Community.
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Not that lowlife scum like you deserve any attention but: ..." ..." ..."
"... Asked
Asked.
"By publicizing the issues
Issues.
"... custom GTK and icons themes by default
Default.
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I agree. The GNOME 3 basically flipped a bird to the existing user base. I guess this is what happens when this free loving developers realize they want to get paid for their work and leave. And then a new round of free software developers working for free trash the platform.
GNOME 3 sucks big time. Which is why I use Mate.
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See you, and raise you one "stop beating that dead horse". Gnome always was a steaming pile and always will be, likewise GTK and all its misbegotten spawn. Just put it in maintenance and let it die a natural death already. Never ever try again try to implement a desktop in C. But if you think that is actually a good idea, then why not go all the way and implement in assembler? It has been done you know. And dead, you know.
Re: unclear on concept of open source, you fuckta (Score:2)
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So it's a good thing nobody stops you nor want to stop you from having things look a certain way.
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That is the point, however the bit your missing is the context here. Some distros are apparently "customizing" things in ways that break compatibility with the wide selection of third-party themes. This then cuts the end-user off from selecting from the full range of third-party customizations themselves.
So, there's no issue shipping a distro with whatever kooky default theme you like, however, there is a debatable issue if your distro breaks compatibility with the wider theme ecosystem. That then becomes l
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And even if it does suck - which is subjective anyway - you only have to change it in one place provided the apps are well behaved.
Theming apps? (Score:5, Funny)
Linux doesn't have apps, it only has programs.
Next question.
Re:Theming apps? (Score:5, Funny)
Luddite distros have programs. All the hep cats are like totally apping it these days, daddy-o.
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I can dig it, man, I can totally dig it.
A squid eating bread from a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
And so is Tux, for that matter.
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Millennials my dear. Their frame of reference is a smartphone and apps.
I noted that the signatories are not developers of things I use (as a Linux poweruser). No Vim, GiMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice people - just some random corner cases. They have a bit of a point, but this is a ripple in a teacup. For example, under Manjaro, I quickly changed GiMP's theme to other than the ugly, monochromatic, useless, flat Gnome icons. Couple of clicks, done. I guess if your software relies only on the system default th
Closing (Score:5, Insightful)
Working as intended. WONTFIX
Seriously, they're using theming for its intended purpose and no, they're not damaging your precious UX. Usability is indeed more than skin deep. If your usability suffers because of a theme, your design is bad. Change it. GTK+ in particular has great big blocks of code intended to natively support all necessary adjustments to widget sizes to accommodate theme differences. If you are subverting those features, you're doing it wrong. Stop it.
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UX experts like pixel placement and static images. In other words, they hate it when a user wants to change anything (e.g. font sizes, which has been the bane of professional UX designers since the 80s). They also don't care about functionality. They prefer just one button, the "do what I want to do" button. In short, in my experience, professional user interface designers are idiots.
Re:Closing (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda like how systemd took over Linux
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I said specifically UX, not HCI, nor UI.
This is definitely an important distinction. The classic Mac OS guidelines were a masterpiece of coherent and meaningful UI design, but UX as we currently understand it is quite a bit newer (read: trendier, sexier, and hipster-ier).
And while the original Mac HI guidelines did have pixel placement, it was mostly in border/icon spacing and was usually intended to allow for localization space needs to be dealt with. It was also (originally) on a unified, dedicated B&W monitor with a single display and (mos
Re: Closing (Score:1)
Is there an adjustment which will allow me to once again be able to 'shade' and 'unshade' a window by rolling the title bar with my mouse wheel?
Re: Closing (Score:5, Informative)
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Nice rant but it doesn't actually have anything to do with this story nor the OP post.
Re:Closing (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just it - it sounds like Gnome doesn't actually have theming support - it has a bunch of hacks and kludges that let you get the same superficial result - mostly. And when "mostly" doesn't cut it, and a desktop re-theming kludge messes up something in a program's interface, it's the program's developers that get the bug reports, and have to either work around DistroX's mangled flawed theming kludges, or tell users to switch to a distro that doesn't used flawed theming.
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Freedom to modify is freedom to b
Re:Closing (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is trying to shut anybody down. Program developers are just asking desktop developers to stop breaking their software just because it happens to use the same GUI toolkit as the desktop. I don't get the feeling they even care much what the solution is - if you want themes, put in proper theming support so that developers can deal with it reasonably, instead of trying to make their software work on 16 different piles of kludges.
My impression is that this isn't even an open-source specific issue - anyone who uses the GTK GUI toolkit (which is licensed LGPL and thus can be be used in proprietary programs) is affected.
Basically the message seems to be: Distro makers - stop alienating program developers by making them have to develop for your distro specifically. You're using a cross-platform API, if you can't theme it right, stop with the theming, because you're making more work for everyone else.
Re:Closing (Score:4, Informative)
That's just it - it sounds like Gnome doesn't actually have theming support
That much is true; the theming is from Gtk not from Gnome, and the Gnome people should probably STFU.
You went off the rails after that, though. The problem isn't kludges, the problem is that some Gnome developers think everything that uses Gtk is somehow part of "the Gnome community," when really they're not, they're just teams that chose to use the Gtk API.
Re:Closing (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I've always had with the UI designers making Gnome, Windows, Android, iOS is that they think they should have all the control over what the interface looks like. That the users should have no control and must meekly accept whatever it is they come up with. The thing which saves Linux from that mentality is that users are free to hack and kludge the UI to their liking, even if the Gnome developers don't want to give them any control. Windows, Android, and iOS are not so lucky (I've been trying for years to turn everything in Android into dark mode, because the Ui designer(s) is apparently an idiot who likes blazing white backgrounds and doesn't know that those of us with OLED screens are suffering reduced battery life because of them forcing their design preference onto us.)
A UI For The Masses. (Score:2)
The problem I've always had with the UI designers making Gnome, Windows, Android, iOS is that they think they should have all the control over what the interface looks like. That the users should have no control and must meekly accept whatever it is they come up with. The thing which saves Linux from that mentality is that users are free to hack and kludge the UI to their liking...
There is a reason why Microsoft, Apple and Google have hundreds of millions, if not billions of users. who have their own needs and specialties and are not expert in UI design or hacking. Not to mention the corporate or institutional environment where systems must be shared and training in the most basic of tasks is expensive. Lock it down. Keep it simple.
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The fiends.
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Sounds like GTK has a very serious bug. If I write something in GTK and it supports themes, they should work. If something doesn't work it shouldn't be allowed.
Reopen: Priority Critical
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And also, way way more people are using Gtk+ themes than Gnome, ever since Gnome adopted a weird UI paradigm that varies from what most of the Gtk apps were written for. After all, there is very little software that is actually for Gnome; most of the "Gnome" applications are just regular Gtk applications that work with any desktop environment.
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and no, they're not damaging your precious UX.
And no, we didn't RTFA. THIS IS SLASHDOT!
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And no, we didn't RTFA. THIS IS SLASHDOT!
Shit no. Who has time for that?
Dont like theming? (Score:1)
Give something away for free and people will enjoy the freedom to try some theming.
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Which would be fine, if users had an option for "don't use your imperfect desktop theming kludge for this program, because it's fouling up the interface".
Re:Dont like theming? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fair point but that would be a solution to the symptom, not the problem. As someone who had to maintain GTK+ software, here is my understanding of the problem:
- GTK2 was showing its age and could not be made to support modern things like wayland. Since you can't just re-write something that works and you need to re-design from the ground up, GTK3 was born.
- The GTK people decided as part of the re-design that end-users are imbeciles and should no longer be given control over what the interface looks like. They also are pushing the trend that mouse pointers, windows and menus are a complicated/confusing concept and that everything should run full-screen because hey, that's how an iPhone works.
- Developpers who used GTK found themselves with functionality they relied on to design their interfaces disappearing, so they started hacking and bending what was left backwards to try and keep things working semi-OK.
- Those 'improper design' hacks are not taken into account by the theming functionalities of GTK.
- Things break.
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If Wayland support is so hard you can't even include it in an API that already supports the X Window System, Windows, Mac, etc, then maybe the programmers just shouldn't have joined the project, and should leave the old version as the latest version?
I still write applications against Gtk2. And guess what? My clients neither know, nor care! It was already portable, and the truth is that it still is portable! Gtk3 wasn't about things that Gtk2 couldn't do, it was about a new maintenance team who wanted to mak
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Which would be fine, if users had an option for "don't use your imperfect desktop theming kludge for this program, because it's fouling up the interface".
Well don't choose the applications that tore out all the configuration then! The old-school Gtk apps have those sorts of settings, and always have had.
If you don't like it, use a different license (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're worried about your brand, then use a license that doesn't permit changing out the elements that reflect it. But then you don't get to incorporate code from people who specifically chose a license that doesn't let the developer exert that much control. It's the same tradeoff as always, and if you don't know it, you know what to do.
TL;DR: You chose that license, now we're following it.
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If you're worried about your brand, then use a license that doesn't permit changing out the elements that reflect it.
I don't quite think you understand what is actually happening here. There is no license you can pick that says "this app is only permitted to run on the default GTK theme".
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I don't quite think you understand what is actually happening here. There is no license you can pick that says "this app is only permitted to run on the default GTK theme".
You accuse me of lack of understanding, then you assert that nobody can have a license like that because none yet exists. I suppose you believe that the existing licenses are discoveries, and not inventions? They were created by God and discovered by RMS, MIT, Berkeley, etc?
If you don't like people "theming" GNOME (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't make the GNOME platform theme-able. But be prepared for someone to fork the most recent theme-able version, and for everyone to move on to that new project. The good news is, you won't have to worry about this any more.
Welcome to Open Source software.
Re:If you don't like people "theming" GNOME (Score:4, Funny)
"Don't make the GNOME platform theme-able."
Don't say that! Gnome devs might be listening.
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They have already said that themeing is bad and people shouldn't do it.
In later days of GTK1 and all of GTK2, theme capability was a core design principle.
In GTK3, they liked using .css for designing for themselves, but did not intend for users, distributions, or applications to use it. Now they have said a few times they wish people would stop it and have gone so far at times to say they may consider taking stricter measures to discontinue how themes work. Basically it's infested by web developer mindset
Re: If you don't like people "theming" GNOME (Score:2)
Or (Score:2)
Apps shouldn't have their own themes (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand their plight but what really irks me, is when applications ignore the OS set UI/theme and such as have their own.
Apps should not have their own theme, and should obey the OS. I'm looking at your anti virus vendors!!
Re:Apps shouldn't have their own themes (Score:5, Informative)
I understand their plight but what really irks me, is when applications ignore the OS set UI/theme and such as have their own.
Apps should not have their own theme, and should obey the OS. I'm looking at your anti virus vendors!!
That is annoying, but 99% of the time you see that, it's because they're using a different widget set. These days GTK+ and Qt can share themes back and forth, there's a GTK+ theme engine that uses Qt to draw widgets, and there's a Qt theme engine that uses GTK+ to draw widgets, so the vast majority of your apps can have essentially the same appearance. But if you then bring in a FLTK or Tk app, it's going to stand out, and look ugly. In the case of Antivirus, however, they may actually be avoiding using the stock UI because it's tied up in libraries which are often compromised by malware.
Re: Apps shouldn't have their own themes (Score:1)
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the engine to draw gtk with Qt is long dead.It only works the user way around.
Yeah, I can see that the situation has deteriorated significantly since GNOME 2 and Qt4. That was the period when everything in Linux worked really well for me in general. It seems like things have gone badly downhill since. I'm still using MATE, though, so that works.
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GTK + Qt? That's, what - 2 gigs of overhead?
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I run Kali with XFCE on my eee. I installed Nautilus - the boring sensible one I use on CentOS on my main machine - because PCThorknobFuckMother or whatever the defaults is has some annoyances. The fucking thing nearly blinded me and I couldn't even find half of the controls.
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If this means what I think it means, then I'm totally with you. I find it a major pain in the behind when the global theme I've setup that includes arrow buttons on the scroll bars is ignored by an application that often deals with extra-long content---making it nearly impossible to scroll small amounts. I'm talking about you Firefox though, to be fair, you're far from the only offender. (My preferred text editor has the same problem.)
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Of all the possibilities, the icon should never change. It's what people look for to start a thing. If I see "web browser" then it isn't Firefox, even if it actually runs Firefox. Changing icons means I don't know what runs when I click, and that is unacceptable.
Make Adwaita suck less, then (Score:5, Insightful)
Vast expanses of empty space the color of day-old oatmeal aren't my thing. If you like your app looking like that, then I'm genuinely sorry, seriously, but it's fucking terrible.
Nearly all the themes suck anyway... (Score:1)
Stop Using Gnome (Score:2, Insightful)
The simple fact is that Gnome, (which I mostly loved in the 2.* versions) now sucks. The devs do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of user wishes or workflows, and think they know UI perfectly (which they certainly don't.) The answer is simple; nobody should use Gnome!
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Gnome 1.x with Enlightenment as the window manager was really peak theme awesomeness, 2.0 was the beginning of "remove all the features".
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Themes are the reason I use Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's one reason I hated even Windows 7 : it has two and a half themes, pretty much crippled to allow no choice especially the Classic (NT/2000) theme where they removed the GUI for color schemes and changing colors.
Windows 8/10 went to one single theme instead. You can choose any fugly solid color for the task bar and that's it.
Can't set window border thickness (but *maybe* you can cheat around this in W10, I think I saw a webpage with a registry setting or something to add window borders like in 8)
How about no. (Score:3, Insightful)
Kindly *improve* the theming capabilities of Gnome. Don't force distros into a standard theme because some app developer happens to like it.
If all distros use the same theme, the theming support will die altogether.
And I *like* my themes.
Hmm. (Score:3)
On the other hand... this is GNOME we're talking about here. For over a decade now they've made a fetish out of denying users the ability to change things and pretending that this is *by definition* an improvement (ostensibly because Apple also hates user choice, though careful observers may notice that Apple has approximately infinity times more money available for testing and refinement.)
So... I am suspicious.
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Apple at least has somewhat component gui designers.
Lol this is why Linux won't succeed as a desktop (Score:1)
If you hate Windows and like Unix there is always MacOSX. Steam hardware survey reported 3% usage in 2009 to .3% today. Notice this occurred right when gnome3 and gnome shell came out?
To me Freebsd and Linux are always going to be great server OS platforms. Or ones I run in a terminal or hypervisor Window. The fact that there is no standards for gui development and interaction is mind numbing. Also the fact X is still around and won of the worst gui and Unix tools of all times equaling only SystemD
Wait, what? (Score:3)
Really, you want people to stop modifying stuff to their own liking?
Isn't that one of the founding principles of FOSS, that people can take it and do whatever they want with it?
Dear "Group of Independent Linux App Developers", ummm, NO.
Go work for Microsoft if you don't want people to fiddle with your masterpiece.
Nice to know all the problems are solved (Score:2)
It's so nice to know that there is so much free time available to argue over things like Theming! I can only assume that means they've solved all the various problems like Gnome being one of the single worst DEs ever designed, or the myriad basic hardware compatability issues that every other operating system on the planet solved over a decade ago.
Maybe they should worry less about themes, and more about things like making sure integrated and descrete graphics play nicely together? Or ensuring that someth
I'd like to ask the narrower ... (Score:2)
... desktop developing community to stop reinventing the wheel and redoing entire desktop stacks every odd year, thank you very much.
Has dolphin reached Konquerors feature set yet? If yes, Halleluja! Please don't start building yet another KDE Filemanager Just yet, ok? And if I want to Theme my desktop, that's my business, isn't it?
Re: I'm a software developer & I do that to... (Score:1)
I'm a software developer
LOL