[LocutusOfBorges]

This seems to quite deliberately miss the point of why so many find the effect libadwaita has had on the desktop experience to be so frustrating.

Really, it doesn’t matter whether the underlying motivations were supposedly to create a cleaner separation between projects at the abstract level - the consequences have been to introduce a situation where, for the first time in quite a long period, large swathes of significant, widely-used programs are no longer capable of fitting in on non-GNOME desktops.

That decision was theirs to make, and they were entirely free to do so - but squirming around the point to avoid talking about responsibility for the actual consequences of the decision re further fracturing the Linux desktop ecosystem is absurd.

[NekkoDroid]

> the consequences have been to introduce a situation where, for the first time in quite a long period, large swathes of significant, widely-used programs are no longer capable of fitting in on non-GNOME desktops.

I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop. Like, not matter how much you theme, the UX is going to be different and that can't really be changed without rewriting the entire app in a different toolkit with the target UX in mind.

GNOME and KDE UX are completely different. One gives you the bare necessaties of options mostly behind a hamburger menu and a nice amount of padding, while the other throws every option and the kitchen sink at you with a relativly high dencity of content. They target different people, which is fine as no size fits all.

[simion314]

>I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop.

Qt does the work to integrate with Windows and OSX, by this I do not mean that it paints the exact shame of border colors on the buttons but more deeper integration, like integrating with the native System Tray, desktop APIs, the correct order of OK/Cancel buttons.

For linux the Qt devs are aware that each distribution has it's own colors,, fonts and crap so it would be a waste to target only a distro say Red Hat.

KDE did the work to make GTK apps integrate as much as possible but I think GNOME did zero work to integrate Qt or KDE apps and they tried sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration.

I am not that type of user that needs all apps to have the exact same buttons otherwise my brain segfaults, I use KDE apps, GTK apps, Java apps, Electron apps. What I want from this apps is to use same Open File Dialogs and not be like GTK where the native GTK file picker has a weird sorting option for files and folders that do not match any other popular and sane system.

Also I remember GNOME guys claiming that you do not need thumbnails in the File Picker, that you are doing it wrong and the reality was that it was not easy to add the feature so they preferred to push that excuse that you are doing it wrong.

[NekkoDroid]

> KDE did the work to make GTK apps integrate as much as possible but I think GNOME did zero work to integrate Qt or KDE apps and they tried sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration.

Sure it's nice I guess if they have their own theme for GTK apps, but if their own QT Kirigami apps look like this[1] on other desktop they should probably focus more on that than on apps not made with their UI framework.

> What I want from this apps is to use same Open File Dialogs

From what I remember it uses the xdg-portal for opening the file dialog, so either this has been fixed a while ago or the portal was misconfigured to use the GTK dialog (on the DE side).

> Also I remember GNOME guys claiming that you do not need thumbnails in the File Picker, that you are doing it wrong and the reality was that it was not easy to add the feature so they preferred to push that excuse that you are doing it wrong.

All I remember is that there were multiple times over the years when patches were sent and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/dolphin-on-PUvU0ze

[josefx]

> All I remember is that their were multiple times over the years when patches were sent and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

The original bug report contained multiple comments pointing out that a file chooser is not a full blown file browser and that it either should not display or cause the creation of new thumbnails.

> and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

Like the guy who stopped responding after only a year of complete radio silence from the GNOME devs?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&

[crashdancer]

>The original bug report contained multiple comments pointing out that a file chooser is not a full blown file browser and that it either should not display or cause the creation of new thumbnails.

I think you're misunderstanding those comments, the point is that an external service needs to generate the thumbnails. If the file chooser needs them it will have to call out to that external service. There isn't any desire to build all the complex system-specific behavior around thumbnail creation into GTK itself.

>Like the guy who stopped responding after only a year of complete radio silence from the GNOME devs?

All open source maintainers I know are overworked. You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request. This is especially true of large PRs that can be overwhelming to review.

[josefx]

> . You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request.

Wether the submitter took it personally or not is not even apparent and it does not change the fact that progress was blocked on GNOMEs side of the process and not by the submitters disappearing after changes where requested as the previous comment claims.

[jeroenhd]

Qt on Windows looks pretty out of place. Qt copied Windows Vista pretty accurately, but I haven't seen any fluent design yet. The Vista style also looks a little off now that Microsoft has tweaked the native controls in Windows 11.

KDE applications look out of place in Gnome. Some Gnome distros pack GTK-like themes for Qt applications, but Dolphin looks like ass on Gnome. Depending on your theme/night mode settings, it's also broken (black labels on dark grey backgrounds broken). Gnome apps may look out of place elsewhere, but at least they're functional.

I, too, can't deal with different behaviour, but KDE is no better than Gnome when it comes to integration. The core application UI design approaches differ, so I doubt good UI integration can even be done; cross platform applications would need complete UI overhauls for every platform they target, ruining the whole point of cross platform UI toolkits.

Thankfully, Linux applications using XDG portals will invoke native controls for features like file pickers, limiting the damage both ways. I expect something similar to happen on macOS and Windows.

[crashdancer]

>sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration

Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."

[simion314]

>Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."

It is sabotage, most people need to use non GNOME apps, like Slack, Thunderbird that need a Tray.

So the solution is super simple, you do not use non GNOME apps then your brain is not affected by a Tray, you do not use non GNOMe apps then your eyes are not bothered by server side decorations, what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME was and they failled, I no longer follow Linux drama closely so I do not know in how many groups did GNOME users fractured? there were 3-4 new DEs based on GTK.

[crashdancer]

None of those apps need a tray though. Personally I have no problem using chat and email apps with only notifications. Something not being to your liking does not mean it's sabotage.

>what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME

I would be very interested to know if you could give a source for this accusation. Just show me one comment from a GNOME maintainer saying they are trying to "force" everyone and how they planned to do it. If they were going into homes and offices holding people at gunpoint forcing them to install GNOME then I think everyone would have heard about that by now.

[simion314]

>None of those apps need a tray though.

What do you mean?

That each time I get of my deska nd then I go back I should either get a stack of notifications or just check each app to see how many emails or messages I missed?

Sure those apps won't crash if soem evil person makes the Tray stuff go to /dev/null.

The idea is if you listen to the users that restored the Tray,a nd the big distros that also restored it or forked GNOME you would be forced to accept the reality, but GNOME designers pretend the reality is wrong and their fantasy is real, somehow reading a book or watching a video about UX makes those guys experts and a big bunch of the community stupid.

Also , stop pretending you are stupid, we all know the big issue with CSD vs SSD , GNOME refusing to make non GNOME apps work on their desktop, check how many forks GNOME vs KDE community had and use logic to understand the real world and non the fantasy in GNOME blogs.

[rleigh]

No. Why should anyone avoid discussing what happened?

We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero. It's been this way for a very, very long time. And that disdain for everyone else has consequences.

I used to develop GTK+ applications. I no longer do. Because it was an absolutely miserable experience, working with a toolkit which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase. It's quite clear that there is no regard for the actual needs of real application developers, and people like yourself aren't helping. You can't defend the indefensible.

[crashdancer]

You shouldn't avoid discussing what happened, I'm saying you should avoid making unfounded bad faith accusations.

>We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero

I mean, the blog post disproves this entire accusation by listing a bunch of projects they collaborate with. This is what I mean: please be more careful with your words. You're disrespecting yourself and the readers of your comments by making these kind of hyperbolic statements.

>which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase

GTK isn't the first or only project to deprecate and remove APIs, Qt does is it in every new version too. And you don't have to do this unless you're upgrading to new versions. Some projects are still using forked versions of old Qt and GTK for these reasons. That's totally something you can do.

[guerrilla]

Yeah, but now there are three, not just two. GTK, GNOME and Qt, rather than just Qt and GTK.

[NekkoDroid]

By that logic you also forgot iced, libcosmic, libxfceui4, kirigami, xapps, flutter, .NET Avalonia, electron/html, sdl/raw rendering, and probably alot more that I don't know or can think of. This really has been just GTK and QT for ages.

[anthk]

GTK was not always tied to Gnome. It was born with Gimp; and XFCE was remade into GTK making it faster than Gnome itself.

[shrimp_emoji]

Gimp Tool Kit!

I wonder when Gimp will upgrade to GTK 4, and realize GNOME has twisted the GTK framework into a draconian railway to making a mobile app with rounded corners, and give up and switch to Qt like so many other apps have.

[tristan957]

Inkscape was ported to GTK 4, and LibreOffice is in the works. Please read the article before commenting.

[Cu3PO42]

It is relatively easy to patch libadwaita to apply non-Adwaita themes. On the AUR, there's libadwaita-without-adwaita. I have applied the same patch on NixOS. It works just about as well as theming does in standard Gtk3 or 4. No complaints really.

[red_admiral]

I know, but that still leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

On Windows, the first thing I do after setting up a new PC is disable the adware, uninstall default apps, turn off as much telemetry as I can, and very soon that'll include turning off the creepy AI too. They say I should use linux instead ...

And on a standard gnome/GTK/adwaita setup, apparently the first thing you have to do is patch the UI library to remove the hardcoded default theme. The free software world wasn't meant to be like this, where you have to fight the OS/distro to get things to work the way you want.

(Meanwhile Mint, as the original article alluded to, is still trying to do good by its users. Long may this continue.)

[okanat]

> The free software world wasn't meant to be like this, where you have to fight the OS/distro to get things to work the way you want.

I think the actual history says something different. The free software world is created by people who think the source code is the ultimate end, however basic it is. Actually combined with the common Unix convention of implementing the most basic and barebones piece of software to maximize text based interaction, I think it is fundamentally against democratizing computers for regular people.

It doesn't have to be this way but many founders thought and still think that barely useful but libre software is better.

[red_admiral]

The thing here is - around the era of GTK2, when themes (and widgets) were mostly bitmaps, there were a few things you couldn't do that adwaita is great at, but changing your accent color? Hell yes, just set the accent color in a .rc file and you're good, because that just changes the color at a particular index in the palette of the bitmaps used to draw a window.

Earlier still, there was a lot you could do with `~/.Xresources`.

Theming back then was much more a negotiation between "designers" and "users": if I like someone's general style of buttons but I'd like them in red instead of blue, I can easily do that, no coding required. You didn't even have to edit the bitmaps by hand most of the time. Want the widgets from this theme but the window decorations from that theme, but with a different font? Config file, or a few clicks in the settings GUI.

The code of the window manager/desktop environment was written to make this kind of thing possible.

In theory, you could develop a CSS-based theming where you can still factor out some key settings like "accent color" or "roundedness of corners" into variables that are easy to set or edit. Then the OS/DE would ship a default theme that works well, and if the user wants to change those settings to something that works better for them, it's on them not to mess it up.

It seems to me though that adwaita is doing everything short of DRM to make it maximally hard to disagree with their design choices.

[franga2000]

I think the best way to solve this iis having an easy way to set the theme per-app. Any time an app is broken because of a theme, I have to either switch back to the default or submit a bug report and hope it's fixed / fix it myself. If I could just, let's say, right click on the window in the taskbar and click "use theme > default > always for this app", incompatibility with a theme wouldn't be a real problem, just mildly annoying.

[Cu3PO42]

> The free software world wasn't meant to be like this, where you have to fight the OS/distro to get things to work the way you want.

I'm of two minds about this. I get where you're coming from, but I also understand the reasoning behind this default behavior. I've seen a lot of UIs in visually broken or even dysfunctional states due to bad themes. I get why app developers want to prevent that. You and I both, and probably most everyone here, know to turn the theme off first and see if we can reproduce the issue before reporting a bug, but does everyone?

In my mind, if we want the Linux desktop to be appealing to the broader masses (and I really want this), we need a desktop environment or two that makes some concessions in this direction (e.g. making things more user-proof) without compromising on its values. To me, themeability is nice and something I want personally, but it's not a core value that needs to be upheld.

[red_admiral]

It is a core value once accessibility gets involved. Color-blind or partially sighted users, or dyslexic or highly sensory-sensitive users, may want to make choices that would seem weird if not painful on the eyes to most people, but that work well for them.

[jrm4]

I find the attempt to define "design language" amusing -- feels like if you have to devote that many words to what you're trying to do with design you've already failed hard.

[tristan957]

Every successful OS or application has a design language. All Microsoft Office applications look similar because they all use the same design language. Why do you diminish what you don't understand?

[jrm4]

It's not that the language exists, it's that GNOME's is so bad that they have to write about it.

E.g. there was never any need for Apple to talk about their "design language."

[tristan957]

Yes, they do: https://developer.apple.com/design/.

[jrm4]

sigh

for VERY different reasons.

[tristan957]

State the different reasons.