One thing the GNOME community got right, despite the clamour and gnashing of teeth.
Consistent cross-app theming support is a pipe dream from the 90s that has never worked, except in manicured screenshots to get karma points on /r/unixporn
One thing the GNOME community got right, despite the clamour and gnashing of teeth.
Consistent cross-app theming support is a pipe dream from the 90s that has never worked, except in manicured screenshots to get karma points on /r/unixporn
Your UI is a collection of input/output widgets. The vast majority of apps have maybe one or two app-specific widgets and the rest are completely standard. Why the hell do so many developers insist on styling every stupid textbox just they way they like it?? No, fuck you, a textbox is a textbox, your textbox isn't special, if I want texboxes on my screen to be in purple comic sans on a green background, that's exactly what they should look like.
The reason why apps break when custom themes are applied is almost always because a developer made a "white box with a grey border and black text" instead of a "--bg-surface-color box with a --border-color border and --fg-primary-color text".
It's the same with icons - if you want a homepage button, reference the "home" icon. If you want a house/flat/skyscraper/boathouse dropdown, reference the "house" icon. If you use "home" to show a house because that's what it is on your theme, don't be surprised (let alone angry) that I've set home to a picture of a cat and now your dropdown makes no sense.
Yes, sometimes the platform doesn't give you enough tools to adhere to the system theme (although most apps aren't complex enough to run into that), but there are usually workarounds or you can open a bug report. Most "modern" developers, however, just don't. They draw their UI in Figma and set out to make it in code, pixel-for-pixel if possible.
Besides, if app developers are doing their job properly as described in the parent comment, then neither user themes, nor distribution themes, should break anything.
Because when a distribution like Ubuntu ships a broken theme, and some app doesn't work as intended, users will report this to the app although it's a bug in Ubuntu.
The linked website is basically complaining that 1) it's too hard, and 2) it precludes app developers from doing their own "branding". The former is just laziness, given that software 20 years ago managed to do it fine, and the latter is narcissism.
Nonsense. Linux is about libre software. It might be about choice, if you want. It’s not about “all software needs to let my desktop look like a clown makeup set or it’s literally 1984”
Amateur environments from the 90s let you do that, but it has nothing to do with the Linux philosophy
Except it literally is about that? Libre software guarantees users the right to make their own modifications to it. That's basically the entire point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
Being actively hostile towards users making and sharing modifications to your software, while still technically permitting them, probably doesn't disqualify your project as "libre" software, but it goes against the spirit of it.
I don't want every app to have a different look or 'brand' as that page says. I want my system to be consistent.
open the color panel and tick the option "tint window title bar with accent color"... which used to be just the window decorator title and borders. ... now some dev wanting to post screenshots on Reddit decided the accent color should be a light pastel tone that can be applied to the top elements of the qt application, bringing back the worst of gnome 2 era.
But I don't really understand what goes wrong there.
i personally think wm fiddlin with application content absurd.
Theming sucks even when you keep the default look. I bet that since many Linux users use custom themes, app developers just give up and don’t even test the default combination.
KDE solved 99% of the theming requirements by just allowing color customisation and shipping with a default theme that doesn't suck too badly.