Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.
The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".
What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack.
Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same on all distros. One complete and verified experience.
The user should be in control of his computer. That includes the programs on it. Locking it down so you can have "verified authentic design" is just straight-up user-hostile.
The programs can still be open source so you can recompile with whatever look you want, but they should bundle a working experiance by default.
But linux users seem more obsessed with curating custom themes over having things actually work.
Linux userspace is buggy, and I think this very-minimalistic approach sort of grown out from frustration about that. And they may be right, maintainers really don’t have the resources to do much better, especially when most frameworks they depend on has their own share of fatal, almost impossible to fix bugs.
The first type of CSS can be written succinctly, but the second cannot.
I suspect even their attitude towards theming done by end-users is more akin to ‘well sure, if you insist, you have the full source code, I can’t stop you, but you’re on your own’ than considering it a fully supported configuration.
There can also be legitimate reasons not to support it. On the top of my head, for example, the default theme being the most tested, etc., etc. In a perfect world, they'd all be tested and well integrated, but there's limited man power going around, and the world isn't perfect.
Though I otherwise agree.
Maybe distros are not doing a good job of this, but that is one thing they have the power to do. QT, GTK2, SDL, wxwidgets, and more toolkits I can't even think of should all fit together on my desktop and look the same. xfce, gnome, and kde all have some nice apps, they should mix and match. This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
I would reject a distro that did this (unless I could disable it). But users should be able to make everything look the way that works the best for them.
We could shift cultural expectations so that distro maintainers become the first tier of support for all app issues in their distro, and escalate issues to app developers if and only if they've confirmed that the issue is distro-agnostic. That would be sustainable for app developers but could be a heavy burden for small distro teams.
> This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
Agreed, I just don't think it's the responsibility of app developers to solve.