[crashdancer]

That isn't possible in any scalable way in any toolkit. There's a good reason all the major commercial operating systems basically only support light/dark mode and maybe a couple other theme variants/options and that's it. I think you are underestimating just how complex the style is for a non-trivial framework/toolkit/application and how it's full of interdependencies and platform quirks.

[brnt]

Yet in the Gtk2 days this was trivial and universal. What changed?

[crashdancer]

I have no idea what you're referring to. Nothing changed, because it didn't actually work in the GTK2 days either. Actually it was worse then. Themes would break apps constantly. I remember always having to edit gtkrc when something broke, and sometimes that wouldn't even work or the app would just crash entirely. It was even more "fun" if a theme crashed the window manager or the panel and then you had to switch out to a VT to fix it.

[brnt]

You say you have no idea what I'm referring to, and then proceed to talk exactly about the feature I was refering to.

This together with your other inconsistent comments here make me doubt your sincerity. You seem to be either tracking Gtk/Gnome Dev closely or are a Dev, but then pretend to speak for users of Gnome and ask others not to speak for users of Gnome. You seem to be in some sort of damage control.

Gnome 2 came with themes, that worked really well, and rarely broke. Denying it only makes you look silly.

[crashdancer]

The themes didn't work well for me and I've talked to lots of other users who had the same experience. It was a broken feature and it was correct to remove it. If you're denying my experiences and telling me they're not real then you are the one who is pretending to speak for other users of GNOME. So please cut that out.

I don't follow development closer than anyone else, I just periodically read the dev blogs and changelogs like any user should. The difference is I don't assume that developers are hostile entities that are apparently spending all their spare time being passionate about their open source project just to annoy some users? Come now, think about it, isn't that a ridiculous notion? I mean really, I'm complaining about a broken feature and you're saying that's damage control. Wouldn't it be more "damage control" to insist that GNOME 2 somehow fixed all its theming bugs by doing something mysterious and unexplainable that no one can figure out 20 years later?

When I comment I try to counter the negativity and focus on making constructive comments, I strongly urge you to do the same. It's not like the developers are aliens that can't be understood by mortal humans, if you really need something explained you can just go in the Matrix channel and (respectfully) ask them questions.

[brnt]

This thread is full of people trying to share experiences that you seem to not allow, Gnome 2 themes working well (for them) being one of them. Sharing the observation of a downward trend _is_ constructive. Trying to invalidate such observations is not.

Considering Mate and Cinnamon still exist and are healthy projects would indicate there's many developers who share this sentiment. Nobody maintains older versions of KDE, apart from a single distro using Trinity (KDE3). That's quite a contrast as well.

I wasn't, and very few are, treating developers hostilely, we are just sharing whatever experience we have. That this isn't altogether positive, is not our fault or responsibility. That's the 'risk' you run creating products for end users who just use it. Nobody forces anyone to code for them.

Please stop putting words in my mouth, nowhere did I write that Gnome2 was bug free.

I suggest you take your constructive criticism to hand yourself.

[bonzini]

> Gnome 2 themes working well (for them) being one of them

For some definition of working well. What I remember was debugging a case where the KDE theme for GTK (that is, to make GTK look like KDE) wanted to fork() and exec(), and that caused bugs if you initialized GTK at a slightly different place in main() than what most programs did. I had to add a special case to QEMU just for that...

Proof: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/commit/a59629fcc6f603...

Even if something "works well" for some people, it does not mean it is not (in retrospect - no offense intended to the original authors) a steaming pile of crap.

[crashdancer]

>This thread is full of people trying to share experiences that you seem to not allow, Gnome 2 themes working well (for them) being one of them.

The mistake you are making here is that someone not experiencing a bug does not invalidate the existence of that bug. You can be using a feature and it can be working okay for you but if it causes bad problems for lots of other people or causes maintenance issues then it will get the axe. This is not to disallow your experiences, but to say there are reasons the developers may not consider your experiences to be representative of a typical experience, or ones that are even worth acknowledging. Because ultimately the developers are the ones who have to listen to all the complaints from everybody and decide which ones are valid -- users can't and don't do that, if they did then they would be developers.

>Considering Mate and Cinnamon still exist and are healthy projects would indicate there's many developers who share this sentiment.

That doesn't indicate it though, Mate and Cinnamon don't use GTK2.

>Nobody maintains older versions of KDE, apart from a single distro using Trinity (KDE3).

But you just disproved your own assertion with an example! If there's one even example then that means a certain percentage of users aren't happy.

>I wasn't, and very few are, treating developers hostilely,

I can't agree with this, I have read several hostile comments in this thread accusing GNOME developers of "sabotage" and things like that. I apologize if you aren't doing that.

>is not our fault or responsibility.

I can't agree with this either, if you aren't even using GNOME but you continue to complain about it then that is completely your responsibility. At some point you have to accept responsibility for your own choices. If that means you have to pick up GTK2 and fork it then that's what you have to do. You can't fault GNOME for not doing that just to please MATE users or whatever it is, when those users would probably still be unhappy with modern GNOME anyway.

>nowhere did I write that Gnome2 was bug free.

But that seems to be exactly what you were suggesting in regards to themes? What am I missing here?