[_2paq]

> The tweak tool method was also an unsupported third-party thing with most of the same limitations.

Interesting, so what was and is the supported first party method to change themes and set keyboard shortcuts and use Emacs keybindings and make the Caps Lock key behave as Esc on GNOME?

[shatteredgate]

AFAIK there has never been an officially supported way to set those in the GNOME GUI and that's true of everything else in the tweak tool including the themes, that's why they're technically in "use at your own risk because this can break everything and mess up your apps" territory. Those are only implemented as hidden settings that the tweak tool modifies. Not sure about other desktops, XFCE might have a GUI to set them.

[_2paq]

Interesting, I'll remember this the next time someone tells me to just use GNOME Tweak Tool to use Emacs keybindings or change the theme or keyboard shortcuts because they're unsupported features and maybe disabled anytime without notice, despite the apparent impression most people seem to be under when they use GNOME Tweak Tool.

[shatteredgate]

Yes, you should also remember that when using third-party KDE themes like qt5ct, or hidden KDE settings, or anything else really that wasn't intended by the developer. In my experience with all of those settings, they do work sometimes but with certain apps they can break. That's mostly what unsupported means. I've already said my piece on themes but with keyboard shortcuts, the app can set key bindings that conflict with those and then you'll end up with a broken app again. It's a bad idea to use those settings unless you're willing to revert them at a moment's notice when they break some apps, or unless you're ready to become a developer and fix some of the underlying issues that are causing the breakage.

>despite the apparent impression most people seem to be under when they use GNOME Tweak Tool

I'm not sure what that impression is, GNOME Tweak Tool has always been this way. Other desktops like XFCE can of course expose the setting and make it supported but that's only guaranteed to work with XFCE apps that they've designed to work with that setting.

[_2paq]

> Yes, you should also remember that when using third-party KDE themes like qt5ct, or hidden KDE settings

I don't have much skin in the game to be honest because I've given up on using any GUI apps on Linux wherever possible. If I do use GUI apps, I keep looking for ways to quit using them too. The attitude exhibited by GTK and GNOME developers on their issue trackers and the unstable nature of KDE apps on Wayland has made me cynical about GUI on Linux.

I wouldn't know how to differentiate between "supported" and "unsupported" features on GNOME. If basic features like changing keyboard shortcuts are "unsupported" on GNOME, I'm not sure who the target audience of such a DE is, except maybe grandmas, managers, and people with attention deficit issues. Then again, I fail to see why such people would bother with using Linux in the first place.

And yeah, I would use KDE apps but they're almost unusable on swaywm on Wayland so I've stopped using them as well.

I'll focus on creating and using only command line tools and TUIs. Unlike the GUI mess that we have, they are mostly platform independent and can be used almost anywhere.

It was nice talking to you. Thanks for your time.

[shatteredgate]

>The attitude exhibited by GTK and GNOME developers on their issue trackers and the unstable nature of KDE apps on Wayland has made me cynical about GUI on Linux.

I think you're misinterpreting the attitude, or rather that attitude is the same anywhere. GTK and GNOME developers might just be more honest about it, they're fairly limited in what they can do so they can't really fix every single issue on the tracker in a timely manner. That attitude is the same thing with KDE, they have limited time and so can't stabilize things as fast as they'd like. I'd say use Windows or MacOS if you want an OS that is stable and don't want to deal with the limitations of Linux, it's quite far behind on the desktop, and using things like i3wm or swaywm is putting it even further behind because those don't comprise a complete desktop.

>And yeah, I would use KDE apps but they're almost unusable on swaywm on Wayland so I've stopped using them as well.

The problem there is the same, nothing is really native to swaywm or i3wm so you'll probably find that most apps suffer usability issues on them. That's been my experience with third party window managers. If you like KDE apps you probably should use KDE for the most reliable experience.

>I'll focus on creating and using only command line tools and TUIs. Unlike the GUI mess that we have, they are mostly platform independent and can be used almost anywhere.

TUIs have a number of other issues so I can't really suggest those either, you're forgoing a lot by making them. There are no perfect options for platform independent GUIs, everything is a trade off. I would personally suggest making web apps or Electron apps before I would suggest TUIs.