Please don’t theme our apps
stopthemingmy.app
stopthemingmy.app
The situation is even more tricky as what is being modified is not even the software itself but the system dependencies. Essentially the developers in this letter say: do not run our software on an environment that is not the one we support (in practice fedora or a close clone of it) and if you create a distro make sure its a clone of what we support.
I understand the fact that developers do not want to support bugs due to user modifications and strange environments. Free software doesn't imply free support so they can put any restriction on what they want to do. The letter however would have been much less weird if it said "we cannot ensure quality of software X except on our build running on a supported environment, if you run the software elsewhere or with changes (and theming is a change) please don't call it X to avoid confusion and remember you are on your own".
What Firefox did I think its a smart solution to this problem. " We offer Firefox on platform x,y,z. If you build it on something else, call it something else, if you run it on another platform remember you're on your own".
There currently is a growing conflict between upstream developers and distributions, because some of their interactions and dependencies bare badly managed.
For example, upstream maintainers see an influx of bug reports and angry users due to bugs, where the distributions are at fault. Sources for this can be changes to the code that the distributions make for various reasons like backwards compatibility, themes that break user interfaces or simply outdated packages or missing backports.
The GNOME upstream maintainers all are having their ass hanging out on a public gitlab repo, while some of the distributors, who break stuff, are very hard to find, with sometimes ancient bugtrackers.
I trust that the community will find a way to update their relationships and solve these issues, but it starts with seeing what's going wrong and where we have bad incentive structures.
Distros are agents of their users. A user can't make each choice involved in assembling a distro themselves (except for the few who use LFS), so they express their choices by choosing a distro.
Instead, they go around saying that there is only one GTK theme and then leave a convenient backdoor open for hacks with a nudge and a wink. Either open the front door and roll out a carpet or close all the doors and windows.
How do you think GTK+3 handles theming (or lacks handling for it)? It sounds like you're confusing GTK+3 theming for GTK+2 theming (which was based on "engines", which were quite a mess). Now it's very "proper and defined", it's accomplished with a strict subset of CSS which has fairly consistent behaviour.
I personally don't see the point in elaborate theming systems (I'd prefer to just have control over the colours, and maybe one or two of the spacing variables), and it is obvious that they cost a lot of cycles at run time....
but GTK+3's theming system is not braindead, it's just ambitious.
Consistency and overriding bad decisions.
How many do so, anyway? I know Ubuntu has the Yaru[2] theme by default.
I'll add that I personally find the stock Adwaita theme to be total garbage. I've been using the Vimix dark themes[3] for as long as I can remember because they don't make the title bar of windows 30 storeys tall and they don't use beige.
1. https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/commi...
I mean, it doesn't really matter if it's garbage or not; it matters that it's what GNOME app developers are testing their UX against, so if you create a theme that changes the metrics drastically from the ones in Adwaita, your theme is going to break those apps.
You can probably get away with tweaks on color, squashing some elements narrower, whatever, but that's not what the post is really talking about. Things that could be called "variations on Adwaita", or "Adwaita if it had a fancy control panel with metrics sliders and color pickers", aren't gonna break anyone's apps.
They're talking about themes that e.g. change fonts on control labels to ones that don't have the same em-widths or x-heights for some characters, and so things stop lining up flush; or which replacing the icons with an icon set that isn't just "the same icon designs but now in monochrome/superflat/etc." but now has new designs, different to the same degree that the iOS vs. Android emoji themes are different, such that your gun becomes a water gun (or your homedir becomes a hand throwing devil-horns.)
This article is antithetical to the whole cultural foundation that GNOME builds on, without which there would probably not be an open source desktop ecosystem to build apps for.
I strongly urge the authors to take in the arguments of the top comments and reevaluate their positions.
And you know what? The more you enable and facilitate customization, the better and richer will the options provided by the community be. I can see how the argument makes sense for particular distributions like Elementary OS and maybe Linux Mint that are aiming at a unified experience for novice users. I really hope other distro maintainers don't pay attention.
This is what I take issue with as a user. A major reason why I prefer GTK is exactly because I can get a homogenous look without having to tweak every single app individually. There are definitely issues with the way this is handled (and I'm TBH still confused about squaring Qt and GTK styles), but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
GTK stylesheets - mostly a problem of different GTK versions they're made for, because GTK versioning is a mess.
App Icons - so what? I think most people like consistency - look at Windows 10 and its ~4years of development, it's still a mess and if I had an option I'd switch right away
All in all I think the choice should be left on the user after distro install, use default gnome look by default and have an option to switch to another with a warning. I agree that devs shouldn't have to deal with someones custom stylesheet issues.
Why? There is already a standard. It does not specify what icons look like, but what they mean. Replacing an icon with another that has the same meaning is not a problem. Of course, if you, say, abuse the "system-search" icon to show a looking glass, this will not work with a theme using a different metaphor.
The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage. Using it as an an example is like saying distributions should not change the default font because they might choose Wingdings.
A lot of icon themes are pure garbage, or at least incomplete. I don't think the example chosen here is any worse than what I've seen on my own system. Honestly, most icon themes are a failure; visual metaphors are just plain hard, and there's no substitute for literacy.
Freedesktop.org is kinda bad at showing that it isn't a dead organization.
The 0.8.90 is also wrong, since then there've been some changes - diff:
+ system-reboot The icon used for the “Reboot” item in the desktop's panel application.
+ user-available The icon used when a user on a chat network is available to initiate a conversation with.
- user-online The icon used when a user on a chat network is available to initiate a conversation with.
For example, what happens when there's system searching element that needs to be in visual proximity to a magnification, zooming or loupe-inspection element? It's impossible to know if an icon theme is going to maintain consistency and/or disambiguity with the default theme.
Actually, "system-search" is always "The icon used for the “Search” item in the desktop's panel application.".[1] Admittedly that makes it a bad example because an application generally doesn't need this icon.
> For example, what happens when there's system searching element that needs to be in visual proximity to a magnification, zooming or loupe-inspection element?
Hopefully, the application uses the standard icons. The user might have difficulties distinguishing idiosyncratic, unfamiliar icons.
[1] https://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-nami...
I think that if we're going to have toolkits that support custom, nested widgets, those widgets need to be designed to support the context they are in. There will always arise situations where normally-light widgets need to appear on a dark background, or vice versa. The nested path bar example is exactly this - it's a widget that supports a single context (light background), but is having two contexts forced on it by leaky style cascades (light text, but also light background).
How about we bake the concept of "light" and "dark" into the widgets themselves and take advantage of the cascading nature to switch the theme of a widget depending on the context it is in.
Realistically though, GNOME 3 was rather short-sighted when it came to themes. Windows 95 showed us the way 24 years ago: you can change the colours of anything you want. You can tweak the size of most things. You can change the fonts. You can change the icons. Simple API that gets applied on top of an existing theme. Expand this for 2019 with dark and light variants for each theme, and I bet we'd satisfy almost all users.
I also agree that if you make an app screenshot/tutorial it is better to use the default theme unless you are targeting users for specific distro.
However I see some flaws in Adwaita (the default GTK theme) and a lot other themes regarding the titlebars:
1. They are too tall for no obvious reason.
2. the most irritating thing is that it is very hard to tell the active window. I mean it is a bit lighter but that's all.
> 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.
Which is a sentiment I can get behind. Telling distributors that they need to make it clear the styling might break things is not wholly unreasonable.
1) use offset colours, like specifying to move 10% in Hue off the theme colour.
2) specify all foreground + background colours and admit that this is special and won't conform to any user or distro theming
But, as a user I want for my experience consistent on my os, irrelevant of that different apps are written by different people on different setups. I want consistent icons, I want menus that follow same convention, I want to change text colours and sizes.
The biggest issue is that developers don't want to follow gnome checklist. Instead of that, they hardcode colours and behaviour. They go heavy into 'it works for me'. And then have audacity to complain that world doesn't bend to their will.
Here is a gnome checklist. I wish the open letter stated how their application follows the checklist and was broken by a distribution so that the checklist now includes fails.
https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable...
Icon consistency is also just not possible. Any halfway decent application with a properly designed UI will have a set of prominently displayed custon icons for the main commands that make the software what it is. There is no way that these icons can be consistent with whatever random theme you chose to use today.
I'll stop themeing apps and their icons once I don't see a single piece of software that has an UI and an icon look like as it were made in the 90s, also implement dark theme. Providing a more consistent UI for new users on a distro is also better idea than leaving it up for the developers.
The GNOME back button being wrongly themed is solved by switching GNOME to dark mode (`gnome-tweak-tool`) and a dark theme. The engine isn't the best but devs don't make it easy either.
Another thing Havoc Pennington liked to talk about in developing GNOME 2 was 'crack'. These were things in GNOME 1 that were bad for the community, but that a lot of users were addicted to. Like, for instance, an overabundance of user settings.
By all accounts, it's hard to write a GUI app for the Linux desktop, in part because of the huge variety of distros and desktops, and apparently even themes within a single desktop. And as a user, my biggest complaint about desktop Linux is the relative paucity of high-quality applications. (Yes, I know there are many high-quality desktop Linux applications. But there aren't as many as on Windows or MacOS.) I can't help but wonder if most of the community wouldn't be better off if a single distro, hopefully with a single desktop and a single theme, decisively 'won' and claimed a dominant usage share of the Linux desktop. Then third-party developers would be incentivized to just develop for that distro, which might make the lives of both users and developers better in the long run.
And of course, since it's open source, if 'the one true distro' went off the rails eventually, someone else could fork it and become the new 'one true distro', with relatively little danger of vendor lock-in.
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
That blog post was linked to from here:
https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issue...
Although I dislike it when people significantly change UI controls.
I have no question that every study of user interface ever published would indicate that buttons changing visual appearance, position, or availability with no predictability several times in a browsing session is a high friction interface.
The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever).
Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.
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.
Meh about the in-app theming. Probably should not be bundled, but sadly most OSS ist lacking in the front-end and can really use some polish.
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. Consistency is more important than your "brand".
> Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are not very useful if they look nothing like the real app does once you install it.
> User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation.
Nonsense. Theming doesn't affect the layout of a program. If people were that bad at abstraction, then how do they recognize they can sit on a metal chair if they are familiar with wooden ones?
> They are built and tested for the upstream GNOME stylesheet, icons, and fonts, so that’s what they should look like on peoples’ systems.
No. They should look like the user chooses them to look. One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like.
> Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform.
∀x. x without any QA is reckless.
Hell there’s even a paragraph aim directly at end users.
> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.
You’ve completely dismissed all of their concerns out of hand, in an entirely unhelpful and hostile manner.
Why did you even bother writing a comment?
Good question. Why did I write things like the following if you don't read it anyway?
> One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like.
But I do take issue with attacking developers who write applications for free, and contribute to the Linux ecosystem, for making a reasonable request to platform developers.
It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.
> 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.
Just not with the same vehemence as its message directed at distros.
This all seems like a huge issue made about nothing on consequence
If the letter was aimed at end users, that qualifier would have been redundant. Therefore the letter is not aimed at end users.
I understand that the devs do not want to be responsible for bugs stemming from broken themes, but this is the wrong solution. Ultimately the solution is a better theme API, not this which would essentially stop custom themes all together for most end users.
In other comments people argue that this isn't aimed at end users, but end users would of course also be impacted from this.
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.
That is an unfair inference because the author of the post explicitly says otherwise. To the extent he is speaking to you, he is only saying "thar be dragons" and that he will not explicitly support your use of a theme—therefore you should file any theme-induced bugs with the theme author and not with him.
I don't see a good technical solution here, but I see two social ones: a) developers of FLOSS must understand they're writing software that can and will be modified and re-released by others, sometimes individuals and sometimes organized groups (like people making Linux distributions); and b) users need to understand that if they have a problem with their software, they should reach out to people from whom they got that software for support. If you got a program from developer's home page, you should contact them directly. If you got it from your distro, then distro maintainers should be your first line of support.
(Also c), some users won't understand b), and forwarding support requests to appropriate people is just part of publishing FLOSS.)
How is releasing software under a license and asking people not do things allowed by that license reasonable?
If GTK3 still does not support theming, that explains why theming causes issues. In which case it would be better to implement proper theming support because stopping distributions from theming clearly doesn't work.
Oh yes, people have always done it, via one hack or another, and as long as it was more of a "for people who really want to fiddle" it wasn't that much of an issue.
But now expectations have risen, people expect more solid behaviour and look/feel from their apps, and distros routinely have quite different GTK themes.
Themes are imposing a real cost on developers who let's be honest are doing the Linux platform a massive favour by even bothering to write apps for it. I hope the audience of that article are a little more sympathetic than yourself.
>If it's a bug in the theme, the application developer is just not responsible for it.
And how many times would they have to tell the end user who opened an issue on their app's tracker that?
I'm afraid there is no way around that issue with free software.
There's a super clever life hack my wife used when working in e-commerce. She kept a text file with prepared replies to most common issues and questions, and used the OS's built-in copy-paste functionality to quickly responding to messages asking about the same thing. I hear this kind of functionality is even supported directly in desktop e-mail clients these days.
The users always blame the app. And then when they can't get the app to work they stop using it.
Which means the developer just lost a potential customer.
If you don't like people modifying your software, don't publish it under permissive license.
How do you solve the social problem of a large majority who feel entitled to everything for free?
My solution was to give up, publish free stuff anonymously with zero support, and charge for anything I actually care about. My charged-for software has multiple orders of magnitude more users than the free software, and effectively funds the free software that nobody actually uses.
I regularly think about not publishing the free stuff anymore, but I figure that even if a single person benefits from it, it's a net-positive, and so I keep going. It doesn't stop it being incredibly demoralising.
You can have it on a website where users can talk to other users. And if you like, you can chime in. Say some code sharing platform. My experience is that people will help each other out usefully. You can even nudge them in this direction.
> How do you solve the social problem of a large majority who feel entitled to everything for free?
You don't. Why would you? You don't need to react to what you judge being an entitlement. You can misjudge though.
I've had reactions when contributing bug reports that I felt other person thought of me as being entitled, after I've spent considerable time identifying the root issue and suggesting a code change.
I've also thought of someone being entitled initially, when in the end the person ended up contributing useful service to other users of my program.
“It's possible to do X wrong” is insufficient to support “You should not do X”.
> Good. My computer is not your billboard.
Yes, seriously. If a user runs a free software desktop, chances are the ability to change things according to their wishes is part of why they use it.
> Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform.
Which is why I use a platform that does grant me that freedom as a user.
I’m not against open software or user customization, but this approach does not result in quality software. Distros should be working with application developers and not against them. Here you have a large group of Linux app developers undersigning a plea to stop breaking their software and all they get is scorn and dismissal.
More Elementary, less winamp-skin-distros.
Their letter is titled "Please don't theme our apps", not "Please don't break our apps".
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 theme. Although many of the same design principles are used in the making of either a chair or a graphical user interface, they are definitely not the same in any regard.
On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time. On top of that, icons can have different meaning depending on your background. Icons can be combined to form a composite icon, and now imagine one of those icons is not displayed as you intended it to be. The entire meaning can change because the design intentions are lost.
On the topic of branding: it's not about your desktop being a billboard. It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems, and it's also - more or less - the only thing about the product that is not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are). And let's be honest: most apps we use in our day to day life have very tame brands and adhere to certain standards. That is because the apps we use are usually good, and we throw the bad, obnoxious ones away really quickly.
All in all, the author presents valid concerns, especially if you don't project them on how you prefer your UI, but rather, how potential Linux / GNOME users could have additional difficulties because of theming issues.
Actually, it's dismissive of the app developers' egocentrism. In so far as theming breaks usability, they do have a point. Distributions shouldn't make potentially incompatible changes to the default theme without QA. But it's not all the fault of distributions and not respecting branding is not a UX problem.
Yes, I may be too harsh towards people voluntarily writing free software. Developers putting their branding and their "vision" before usability and user control is just a major pet peeve of mine. And diplomacy is not my strong point.
> 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 theme.
Actually I would blame the theme, but yeah, the average user would. Wrongly assigned blame is a broader issue with free software and the distribution system though.
> On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time.
The XDG Icon Naming Specification does not actually specify the names of concrete icons, but of meanings. For example, there is no "looking-glass" icon, but there is a "system-search" icon. If you use the "system-search" icon to display a looking glass because that's the metaphor the icon theme you're testing with uses, your application may display the wrong icon with a different icon theme.
If an application needs an icon that is not standardized, it can include it similarly to its own application icon.
> It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems
No, it's about the user recognizing the application. Which they can. The Firefox icon the open letter used as an example is very much the Firefox icon, just in a different style.
> it's also [...] not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are)
Exactly. User experience >>> branding.
As someone who struggles with this too: The world doesn't care that you own it and admit it; they only care if you fix it, or at least work around it for them.
For many websites, web fonts have been an improvement, especially considering the sorry state of "web-safe" fonts back in the day.
The Firefox/Thunderbird example is absolutely ridiculous - it's not up to these application developers to decide what icon or colour the user sees. It's up to them to provide defaults. As you say, it's clearly still Firefox - but even if it weren't, there are several good reasons I can think of that a distribution might want to change it.
What bugs me is the attitude that the solution is to reduce the usage of themes, as opposed to improve the theme engines and app dev toolkits. Why shouldn't the OS be able to impose a global stylesheet for colours, images used for semantic icons, sizes of common elements? If I, as a user, want to starting fiddling with my system theme, is it not likely that I might want all the apps on the system to play ball? Sounds pretty jarring to me to have one or two apps with their stubborn hardcoded "branding". (Oh wait, that's what we already have with Electron apps that don't respect the OS theme or conventions, and they suck!).
Oh, apps can't be restyled without manual work they say. "Until this perception changes..." they say. NO!
In an ideal world, applications could be built easily in such a way that allowed them to be themed without causing major UI bugs. The fact that this is such a large issue with GTK apps is surely further evidence that GTK has a bit of a problem - especially considering that other UI platforms are able to do a better job.
Perhaps - and I'm really pushing it here (/s) - solving the root causes of issues arising from custom themes relating to sizing and spacing might actually have other benefits as well. Like better support for UI scaling. Maybe the scope of themes needs to be reduced a little so it's easier for application developers to support?
Then more crucial aspects of ability - such as eyesight being a major one. Some people can't see some colours that well, some need larger fonts. Things like that in which theme's are the saviour and for many a developer - how they cater for disability usage.
Sure some theme's can break the UI, but to blame the user, which is the case here - now that's egocentric IMHO.
As for branding - how many users care about that?
What it actually does is list a number of reasons why distro themes are bad (in their opinion). Some of those reasons amarettos equally true for end users theming and some of those reasons are not. The letter also does say that end users are welcome to theme themselves but they should do so under the knowledge that there be (potential) dragons.
What it doesn’t say is that theming “doesn’t work”
Personally speaking, I’m on the fence about whether I agree that distro theming is bad. However I do think their points are perfectly valid and that a considerable number of HN commentators have taken the letter completely out of context.
Edit: and I’m also a little peeved that there is so much knee jerk down voting of comments on here. Particularly when those comments are quite literally correct. It’s a really pity you guys couldn’t be bothered to read the letter before abusing your right to moderate.
Theming literally can break the UI in unexpected ways, however if often doesn’t. But if one manages the theme themselves then they are able to manage those edge cases themselves. If a distro does it then they can’t guarantee the end users are even aware that the unexpected UI is the fault of the distro.
That point was clearly laid out in the letter too. If people had bothered to read it.
End users can make that choice with regard to the extremely limited set of applications and use-cases that matter to them. A distribution has a far wider landscape to consider.
If you consider something that does not work reliably to work, you're right. I don't.
A distribution has to consider more applications and use cases, but it also has more resources. Doing things at the distribution level is much more efficient than each user doing their own thing, that's why they exist.
You’d expect (hope) core applications would be tested but what about stuff that’s not in the official repos? Or stuff that is but had a new feature unbeknown to the distro maintainers?
On HN last week there was a GUI bug in a core OSX utility being discussed that slipped through Apples testing. If they managed to overlook something in their own OS, then a smaller team of people, likely working for free in their spare time (remember a lot of the distros that ship non-standard themes as a default are spin offs) is unlikely to test every GUI form and dialog that can be rendered o. Linux.
Imagine if Apple asked users not to apply stickers to their laptop as it denies Apple the possibility to control their brand, or could make the laptop look broken, even unusable - shock I may even apply a sticker that shows a broken circuit board or simulates cracked aluminium. Apple's view is that applying a sticker to the case or keyboard render Appley documentation useless as they don't look like the pictures we screenshotted in moments.
> Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements
Yeah, and? They might be the difference between unusable discomfort and usable, or allow ageing eyes to cope with arrogant and restricted developer choices, or missing sense of aesthetic. You might not like the colour car I buy or the decorating scheme I choose for my house. Mind your own damn business.
> On the topic of branding
Yeah, about that. It's branding that has led computer and phone makers to give highly limited theming capability. Firefox or my desktop is no longer my own to adjust and fiddle to unusability (sic) or perfection - as I see fit. Like the paint I use inside my house, mind your own damn business. I might LIKE my phone, Windows box and Linux box to all look highly distinct from each other for my own personal reasons. Mind your own damn business.
It is not another surface on which to stimulate my neurons to be further programmed by the brand. Baa.
Edit: Specifically on icons, I have been changing icons since the days of Workbench 1.3 in about 1986 or 87. I won't stop now. I've chosen wildly different icons for some apps at times - because they worked better for me. Icons as space for a logo is an entirely negative fashion to my mind as I prefer a hint, however vague, of what that a rarely used app does.
"However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory."
Unsupported territory, for changing a desktop icon, or adding a higher or lower contrast stylesheet? Wow. That's pompous and absurd for me. Doesn't sound like it's explicitly made a reasonable exception though, just piles on a layer of entitlement for a damn brand.
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.
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.
"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."
> Please read the letter all the way to the end. This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup.
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?
Changing the UI changes the software from the user perspective.
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.
1. http://www.hsluv.org/examples/ These palettes will absolutely NEVER clash. But they might have contrast issues. Which brings us to:
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800718 Lyft primarily designed ColorBox.io to always reach WCAG 2.0 contrast ratios. Something I'd claim a ton of UX themes mess up. Unfortunately from what I can tell, it lacks the anti-clash guarantees of #1
3. Much less related, but still important, albeit only for very specific parts of any UX:
The color map generation approach in Matplotlib: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU (btw.: Seaborn, as mentioned in #1, builds on top of Matplotlib.)
For even more color madness, see this recent Hacker News comment by me as well as the other comments linked to there:
But, unfortunately, it too only serves as a partial solution (since, as far as I know—someone please correct me if I got that wrong—it doesn't address any of the matters discussed above), PLUS it seems highly likely that Adobe has software patents on it.
No two displays that I own produce the same colours. It depends on the hardware, the brightness, the daytime colour cycling I have, and so on.
I feel like if slight changes to colour can wreck your app then your app leans too heavily on colour reproduction.
I've had this comment on my mind for about an hour now, and it strikes me as both correct and yet the behaviour you identify is inoffensive to me in this context.
In particular, I don't disagree with users behaving in an egocentric manner regarding their desktop environment, the software they choose, and the way their hardware operates. That's an intimate and personal space where many spend most of their waking hours; they ought to feel empowered to control and operate it as they wish.
And if that's the case, it may be warranted to have a dismissive attitude towards those who would undermine that power.
Two things to consider:
- Distributions are users
- Users may choose a distribution that suits their desired aesthetic
Not everyone who wants a custom desktop aesthetic is technically adept enough to undertake the customization themselves, or perhaps they simply don't want to expend the effort. That's where distributions come in to assist.
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".
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.
Which is User experience and not Developer experience. As a developer I can agree with them but as a user I couldn't care less about their brand. Sorry if I sound rude. It's not as if they are paying me to keep their brand consistent among desktops.
I theme a little my desktop because I like the general idea of the GNOME desktop but I don't like many of their graphical choices. Colors, scrollbars, margins are all wrong IMHO.
I'm sorry that those developers are suffering and I know that somebody is thinking about reducing the ability to theme GNOME, but I'll keep doing it as long as I can and if I screw something (my emacs scrollbars) it's on me.
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.
Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.
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 industry news from the Web, the Web patterns are the most well-known, and they pollute desktop software development too (doubly so when desktop software is nowadays built as webpages bundled to a browser runtime).
It's not that the Web school of UX is completely wrong; the problem is that it mixes ergonomics with a whole range of tricks designed to make the software more popular and more sellable in spite of the utility reduction they cause, and then sells the whole bundle as "scientifically validated" and "data driven".
But not if they don't even try.
completely agree with this point.
It's also not the distro's billboard, but you seem happy for them to impose their branding upon your desktop, even if they break functionality.
Yeah so, this is bullshit. Why would anyone have any say what my computer looks like.
One of the things I like most about gtk apps is the ability to theme them to achieve a uniform look across all my apps. I would rather use a slightly less functional gtk app than a qt/kde thing for this reason.
Users who care enough to mess with themes by necessity accept that sometimes things may need some tweaking. Most popular themes are on gh and have responsive maintainers who are invested in their themes looking good/uniform. The burden should be placed on the theme maintainers and the users who choose to use non-default configuration, rather than disabling themes on an ad-hoc basis.
Freedom is kind of the point of free software.
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.
Good thing there is at least one then. Blindly cloning other "major UI systems", now that would be a waste of developer resources.
(I don't have a horse in the Electron-is-great-or-crap race)
That's a hard problem to solve, since there are many ways of styling Electron - Bootstrap/Bulma/Material Design/custom stuff. So it's hard to just override CSS rules.
On the other hand, it's the kind of problem perfectly suited for Machine Learning - just take the whole screenshot/image of the app and use a stylistic ML to change it - make it Dark Theme/whatever...
I suspect in 10 years OSes will support ML-based automatic themeing/customization of all apps, regardless of what they are written in.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-...