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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 do

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  >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 2y ago
    > 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 https://imgur.com/a/dolphin-on-PUvU0ze
    - josefx 2y ago
      > 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& https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&
      - crashdancer 2y ago
        >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.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  Yeah, but now there are three, not just two. GTK, GNOME and Qt, rather than just Qt and GTK.
  - NekkoDroid 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        Inkscape was ported to GTK 4, and LibreOffice is in the works. Please read the article before commenting.
Cu3PO42 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- red_admiral 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.
    - franga2000 2y ago
      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.
jrm4 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Yes, they do: https://developer.apple.com/design/ https://developer.apple.com/design/.
      - jrm4 2y ago
        sigh for VERY different reasons.
        tristan957 2y ago
        State the different reasons.
        jrm4 2y ago
        Apple is showing off their success, GNOME is making excuse for failure. This is obvious.

NekkoDroid 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
>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 2y ago
  > 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 https://imgur.com/a/dolphin-on-PUvU0ze
  - josefx 2y ago
    > 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& https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&
    - crashdancer 2y ago
      >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.
guerrilla 2y ago
Yeah, but now there are three, not just two. GTK, GNOME and Qt, rather than just Qt and GTK.
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Inkscape was ported to GTK 4, and LibreOffice is in the works. Please read the article before commenting.

Cu3PO42 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
red_admiral 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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.
  - franga2000 2y ago
    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.

jrm4 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Yes, they do: https://developer.apple.com/design/ https://developer.apple.com/design/.
    - jrm4 2y ago
      sigh for VERY different reasons.
      - tristan957 2y ago
        State the different reasons.
        jrm4 2y ago
        Apple is showing off their success, GNOME is making excuse for failure. This is obvious.