Comment by lavabiopsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lavabiopsy | Hacker News Reader

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That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to work with an endlessly growing matrix of user customizations. At some point people have to decide if they are going to prioritize on working on new features, or if they want to prioritize allowing people to change the colors and the fonts in ways that could potentially cause bad breakage. Your stance on the subject might be different from others. Since it's all open source, you can of course patch it and modify it all you want to match your priorities, and the developers have no problem with you doing that (and may even encourage it sometimes).

>https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3409

I'm confused why this was posted or why it makes you think that? Apps don't need to match the theme exactly to work, I use some KDE apps with the default theme and they work fine.

>Yeah, I know. It's pointless to have discussions, especially when the project in question isn't a community project and follows the "look but don't touch" open source model of development.

If you want to discuss technical issues to solve that, I'd love to, but I am not interested in engaging you further when you make these type of false and inflammatory statements. Your time is worth a lot more than this, please don't spend it doing these things. My point is that the technical issues have already been discussed repeatedly at length, unless you are actively working on implementing this then it seems extremely unlikely that either of us will have anything new to add. So yes, in that sense it is pointless to have discussions, but it's for the opposite reason that you're saying: the community has already had these discussions and done all the "touching" that needed to be done.

> That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to work with an endlessly growing matrix of user customizations.

It's genuinely sad to see that changing fonts is now considered a hack and unsupported behavior on Linux. I'm not into extreme customization or anything of that sort. I don't have any user themes installed besides Adwaita or any icon themes besides Breeze and Adwaita on my Linux desktop running the Sway window manager. But one of the things that I really like is not being forced to use ugly fonts like DejaVu or Segoe. It really is sad to know that soon, some apps on my system will not use the fonts I want them to.

You've asked me not to be cynical but these issues are what drive me to cynicism. I'm not a particular fan of using Linux but I still use it because I'm more uncomfortable with Windows and Mac. But if there's no difference between how they work and how my Linux desktop works, what's even the point? You can't expect users to maintain hard forks or patch and compile stuff.

Thanks for your time though.

This is not new, GNOME has hidden the font settings as an undocumented setting in the tweak tool for quite some time now. I don't think you should have to be disappointed that it's considered an unsupported hack, if it works for you, that's great, keep on doing it. All "unsupported" means is that the developers don't test with that setup... and how could they? They can't possibly test with every font there is, so marking it unsupported is really only an acknowledgement of the way it already was before. If an app developer says don't theme my app, that's likely because it has a high probability of breaking the app. That's what the letter is talking about and gives examples for. And yes, font changes can break apps.

Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it. Also I don't think the internal setting is ever going to get removed from GTK because that it what the themes themselves use to set the font, even if libraries like libadwaita and libgranite want to enforce a certain system theme and font setting, the user still is the one that gets to override the theme.

> Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it.

What do you think will happen when developers who've built their apps using GTK3 start migrating their apps to GTK4? They'll most likely pick libadwaita like the developer of GTkeddit did. He wasn't aware about how libadwaita is going to enforce its own theme and was surprised when I told him about it.

Now, I know I'll never use his app because it's using libadwaita but what if apps like Firefox start using GTK4 with libadwaita? What do I do then? Switch to Chromium? It uses GTK as well. The so-called choice that open source offers is merely an illusion in some cases.

The choices that GNOME devs make end up hurting users like me who want nothing do with GNOME and who aren't even using GNOME.

I don't understand why you're saying that hurts you, that doesn't make sense. If that developer wanted to add support for themes on top of libadwaita they could easily do that, GNOME is not preventing anyone from doing that. Also, what you have told the GTkeddit developer was very likely not correct, users can still load their own theme and libadwaita will not override that. The libadwaita change is about the platform theme, not the user's theme, the user theme still has top priority. I would suggest to correct your statement to that developer before they make an uninformed decision.

But that also leads to another point: libadwaita is intended to be a library that implements the GNOME HIG. If you are using libadwaita apps, that means you are using an app that is intended for GNOME -- so if you "want nothing to do with GNOME" then I don't understand why you would be intentionally using their apps and then complaining that they don't act right with a non-GNOME desktop. A developer who chooses to use that is intentionally choosing to go with the GNOME platform, and there is no reason to be upset about that -- it's not a decision that you have to worry about if you just want to ignore GNOME apps.

Also I think you have a misunderstanding of how Firefox is built, they are a cross platform app, they are not going to use libadwaita. They already have their own theme system too and have for quite some time: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/

I would advise to do more research before making assumptions about these things, if you have questions you'd like to ask then those are a better way to start rather than jumping to the worst possible conclusion. Please try to be careful about online misinformation.

> Also, what you have told the GTkeddit developer was very likely not correct, users can still load their own theme and libadwaita will not override that. The libadwaita change is about the platform theme, not the user's theme, the user theme still has top priority.

Haven't Clasen and several other devs on the issue tracker you and I linked above clearly has statements like "linking to libadwaita is an explicit decision to use the Adwaita theme" and "core GNOME applications linking to libadwaita will then thereby require that every distribution shipping GNOME is forced to consent to having Adwaita as the theme".

The only way a user's own custom theme will be used if a proposed opt-in flag is added to libadwaita (doesn't seem like it will be, recoloring API is being favored) and app developers use that flag.

Correct me if I'm wrong in this point and I'd be happy to go back and talk to the GTkeddit developer again but from what he independently tested, he seems to have reached the same result as I think.

>linking to libadwaita is an explicit decision to use the Adwaita theme

Yes, linking to Adwaita is a decision to use Adwaita theme by default, because the widgets in it are intentionally designed to work well with only with those specific colors, spacings, fonts, etc. But the app developer can override that afterwards if they have additional CSS.

>every distribution shipping GNOME is forced to consent to having Adwaita as the theme

Can you show where this quote came from? This makes no sense and I do not understand why someone would say this at all, any distribution shipping GNOME is free to modify the Adwaita theme or ship another theme, as Ubuntu is already doing for some time. GNOME developers may grumble about it and write more letters like this but they cannot stop them from doing that, no one is "forced to consent" to anything as this is all open source code. If you notice from the letter, the concern is actually the opposite, it's about about downstream forcing their untested themes on some GNOME apps without concern for the app developer, which is resulting in bugs and unhappy users.

>The only way a user's own custom theme will be used if a proposed opt-in flag is added to libadwaita

No, this is incorrect. The opt-in flag is about the platform theme. The change in libadwaita does not affect the user's theme. User's theme still has top priority over all other CSS, this is documented: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.CssProvider.html

And you can in fact verify that it works if you have the latest libadwaita from git master.

I would like to again emphasize that even if this weren't the case, the code is open source and it would still be quite trivial to comment out some lines and install your own CSS, and that is the worst case scenario. So realistically there is little reason for alarm.

> Can you show where this quote came from?

https://files.catbox.moe/p5f920.png

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/259#note_...

I was mistaken to think this quote came from a GNOME dev but then again, a GNOME dev (Benjamin Otte) does seems to have agreed with this so I guess it's all the same.

> So realistically there is little reason for alarm.

I hope you're right and that my fears are a misunderstanding. I have basically started removing any software that has anything to do with GNOME, including Flatpak and Flatseal, which I was happily using until now, because there's no telling what kind of control will be taken away from me. Again, I hope I'm wrong and this is all a misunderstanding on my end as you're saying.

I think you missed the last paragraph of that comment which also mentions GTK apps applying their own themes, which is still an option. If you know a developer who wants to do this then let me know and I can walk them through the process.

I don't understand why you would start reactively uninstalling apps or control would be taken away, I don't believe any of them have gone closed source. If the app is open source then no control can be taken away from you, you can just grab the source and inject your CSS. Again would be happy to walk you through this process, but that would be in the worst case scenario, right now and for the foreseeable future it's unnecessary as you can still use the method I previously described with setting your user theme.

It also doesn't really make sense to me to uninstall some app because of some theoretical bad thing that could happen in the future, if you take that view then you would have to uninstall everything it seems, because there is always a possibility that developers make some decision you don't like 10 years from now when the computing landscape has changed. You can of course stay on an old version if there are some changes you don't like, the developers might grumble more and tell you to upgrade for usability and security reasons, but that's a decision you make according to your own risk factors.

>Flatpak

Huh? Flatpak is an API and CLI, it doesn't use GTK. The ways it's usually accessed through a GUI are GNOME Software and KDE Discover, but you don't have to use those.

> It also doesn't really make sense to me to uninstall some app because of some theoretical bad thing that could happen in the future

In hindsight, I was perhaps being reactive and might've acted irrationally but I still believe that I should try to stay away from anything related to GNOME or GTK, if possible, simply because I don't trust GNOME/GTK developers to keep their "every preference has a cost" philosophy limited to GNOME itself. Like this, for example.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

If I'm being polite, pretty interesting comments from Clasen. Subpixel Positioning might make sense on HiDPI displays but most people still don't have them.

Yes, that philosophy makes sense in some kind of apps but it isn't one should follow universally, in my opinion.

Another simple example is GNOME Screenshot and Spectacle. Spectacle, in my opinion, is perhaps the best screenshot tool on Linux because it offers sensible and basic annotation tools. This is what Android does using its Markup tool on Android and Windows with its Snipping Tool. I suspect Mac has a similar offering. If I want to share a screenshot with some personal information redacted, there's no way to do that using GNOME Screenshot. Yes, I know I can find another app for doing that but that's not the point. It's the "every preference has a cost" philosophy in play again which makes some things dumbed down and deprived of sensible features when they shouldn't be.

I am by no means a KDE "fan" though. I ended up uninstalling KDE fairly quickly when I tried it a few months ago.

I also stand by my statement of "GNOME not really being a community project" after reading the blog posts by Tobias. There is little room for disagreement besides what the "GNOME way" says and little care for downstream.

Thanks for your time though. I appreciate how you've been patiently replying to my comments. Most people I talk to in FOSS communities generally aren't even receptive to discussions when its about disagreement. Everything is either the user's fault or his hardware is faulty.

>I don't trust GNOME/GTK developers to keep their "every preference has a cost" philosophy limited to GNOME

That isn't a philosophy, it's just how development works. Preferences do have a cost, in any project. The actual GNOME philosophy is more along the lines of "GNOME would rather spend the cost of preferences elsewhere" which has been part of the project's philosophy for many years, if you disagree with that decision then feel free to use some other platform.

I don't see what your issue is with GNOME Screenshot, you don't have to use it. Just use Spectacle, nobody is going to take issue with you doing that. The builtin GNOME tools are designed to be simple and straightforward, not to include every feature under the sun. Which features an app has is entirely up to its developer, you can say they should or shouldn't do something but it's not your decision to make unless you are developing that app. The developer might listen to community suggestions but they don't have to, and they are very unlikely to if the suggestions are rude.

>I also stand by my statement of "GNOME not really being a community project" after reading the blog posts by Tobias. There is little room for disagreement besides what the "GNOME way" says and little care for downstream.

This paragraph doesn't make sense to me. The "GNOME way" is just what a group of loosely connected developers all agree on and those blog posts are just one developer's opinion. You're saying it's not a community project but that "GNOME way" is entirely the product of that community, there is nothing else there. Downstream is only relevant as far as they contribute back upstream, because there is no other possible way for there to be any relationship there.

But I would say in a lot of cases with FOSS communities, the well has been poisoned and interactions become toxic very fast, I just try to cut that behavior off at the head and correct any misinformation that is out there.

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