Gnome to prevent theming, wider community not happy
osnews.com
osnews.com
GTK+ theming was never particularly stable and I get the impression the developers are tired of dealing with avoiding breakages or the fallout when they inevitably occur. It's easier to just outright drop support for it.
But it's unclear to me to what extent theming will actually be impossible. I presume the GTK+ look and feel will still be stylized more or less by a theme, it's just the GNOME theme which will always evolve in lockstep with the internal code. This way they don't have to care about breaking compatibility with third-party themes.
TFA is too short on details.
The solution is an actual theming API, which is still in the discussion phase, and an interim recoloring API for distributions who mostly fork Adwaita but use branded theme colors.
Just to clarify: The reason for this is not because GTK's CSS classes themselves are not stable (you are correct that they are stable). The issue is that a theme's CSS classes cannot possibly be stable with respect to any given app's CSS classes, unless the app has explicitly enabled that theme, which is not possible with the current API. If you are using the environment variable then apps do not even have a reliable way to check which theme is loaded.
The feeling with GTK4/5 seems to be that GTK itself should only supply some basic default styles and should not bother handling theming at all. Instead that should be handled by another library which knows more than GTK about which CSS to load and when. This is what is essentially being done with the libadwaita theming API.
This software works well on my Pinephone too.
I'm happy to trade my flexibility to allow the GNOME the flexibility to make improvements that benefit all.
I understand some want more flexibility, however.
I can stick out my neck to recommend upstream GNOME to any coming from macOS or perhaps even Windows. All default apps work great, often better than 3rd party alternatives. Where as in other DE's, I often had to replace default apps including even file manager!
So if preventing theming can preserve this usability, I'm all in for it.
Maybe we should just admit that this is the Gnome Way. If customization is super important for you, maybe KDE, .. are the better options. There's a choice. =)
I did exactly the same ~4mo ago, vanilla Gnome on Arch is blazing fast compared to the Ubuntu one...hell the whole system is, and the archinstaller is great! Perfect KISS i would say, if one need's more then do it the "old" way.
However Gnome40 was just installed to test it, since i use i3 normally, i cant stand the Windows shuffling anymore, it makes me just angry to sort the space on my screen, and i don't even use the tilling thing "correctly" just tabs, virtual desktops and sometimes a floating window.
i for one really really liked when i could make a nice theme, a look & feel for my computer. that was a cool time.
i dont know what the third way is. letting apps express power over the users sounds bad. wider fommunity here sounds like cantankerous bad actors.
edit: i'm way way way off here. apparently gnome won't let ANYONE theme. not users, not app-devs.
This is not accurate, the current plan seems to be for libadwaita to gain a new theming API. Additionally, apps can still load CSS themes on top of libadwaita.
What Android isn't adding is the ability to plug in a library that completely changes the way all the widgets render and which everyone writing applications has to step very carefully around because you never know what anything you write is ever going to look like (but you know users will moan about it).
Also see this longer comment from a GNOME community manager that further explains it: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/pokint/i_themed_http...
GNOME as a project does put a lot of effort into accessibility, they're not just going to throw those themes away. I think the key realisation here is that they consider them to be Adwaita variants, not entirely new themes.
It's a shame because as a user, Qt is the most pleasant of all the toolkits.
In 2019 at Guadec there was a meeting between interested parties with regards to theming.[0] This was the meeting where the current direction of Gnome theming was decided on[1][2]. System76 was obviously (see[0]) a participating party at that meeting.
At that meeting it was decided that everyone at the meeting should contribute to the theming api. System76 at the time announced that they
"First, we’ll work together to identify and document colors that can be exported and modified by theme developers. These include header bars, buttons, switches and other widgets that theme developers often modify. This work also enables app developers to more easily customize the look and feel of their apps."
Elementary and the Gnome developers took over the Dark mode api. Which has been implemented and delivered. It would have been Budgie, Ubuntu and System76's job to get together, write a specification of what they need and then work on a proposal of how they want to achieve that. They didn't do that in the last two years and now they are complaining that Gnome didn't do the job they (Budgie, System76, Ubuntu) agreed to do.
I know, hating on Gnome is easy sometimes. But that really doesn't look like the Gnome devs are at fault. They communicated their intents and reasons years and years ago[3]. This should not been a surprise and complaining loudly about this now - to say the last - a bit dishonest with regards to their initial involvement.
There's still work with regards to a theming API by Purism's Alexander Mikhayelenko, but that work is ongoing[4].
[0] https://blog.system76.com/post/187541504063/the-future-of-th...
[1] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk-adwaita-and-vendor-styles/...
[2] https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/VendorThemes2019/timeslider#161...
what good is it when it was delivered in a broken state for many legacy GTK applications?