7 ms·

Number of new things broke == Theming. Which was specifically marked as unstable, together with a reason why it was marked unstable (being reworked with CSS).

Number of new things broke == Theming. Which was specifically marked as unstable, together with a reason why it was marked unstable (being reworked with CSS). Gnome and other apps didn't break, because they weren't concerned about theming themselves.

r3bl 8y ago
Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrading a GNOME extension resulted in the user session completely crashing, getting me back to the login screen, and making me lose about half an hour of work. Now, of course, I could put the blame on the sole developer that developed that specific extension (one of the preinstalled ones in Ubuntu now), but I don't. I blame GNOME that a botched extension update lead to the entire session crashing, instead of doing something normal (like reverting to the previous version and showing "update failed").
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  This fragility is architectural though and possibly even cultural now. People who promote gnome and make decisions adopting it for mainstream distros somehow believe that such poor level of quality is acceptable. It's how systemd got into mainstream too.
  - jchw 8y ago
    Redhat has killed the Linux desktop with this kind of mentality. No matter what I do, things are broken nowadays. Wayland was broken promises; most of the same issues exist in Wayland still, except now sometimes pasting crashes my desktop, and I can't take screenshots without the compositor's permission. Systemd actually delivered on some of its promises, but not without some brutal side-effects. Same for PulseAudio really. I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. We did all of this refactoring, rebuilding, and yet... Where's heterogeneous graphics card support? Where's heterogeneous DPI support? Why does multiple desktops still suck? Even using all open source drivers, Linux feels dated and immature at the same time :( I miss feeling like it was ahead of Windows.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      RH management basically do not care, because most of this happens in Fedora. With RHEL, RH basically snapshots whatever churn that is happening in the larger Linux ecosystem, and maintains said snapshot for a decade or more.
      - keithpeter 8y ago
        RHEL 7 is seeing changes in the DE version (Gnome 3.8 to 3.22) and other library changes within the 10 year support period so not frozen as much as RHEL 6. Swings and roundabouts.
    - bonzini 8y ago
      Heterogenous DPI is years ahead in Wayland than it is in Windows.
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
        Can you explain the architectural details behind why this is?
    - hedora 8y ago
      > I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. Consider switching to BSD or Devuan (and donating time/money/bug-reports).
    - qplex 8y ago
      I haven't used RedHat since they started to charge for it. Fedora 27 was ok. I think Linux generally works on the desktop. It's true that GNOME 3 is still buggy. I've had Nautilus crash on me while copying files and other horrible things. Wayland hardly has any apps with native support, it crashes a lot and the hardware support sucks too. Also (afaik) applications such as Wine can never be ported to Wayland. However GNOME and Wayland are just one bleeding edge. If you run X with some stable WM or DE, things work so well it's almost boring.
      - 8y ago
  - greenhouse_gas 8y ago
    Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.
    - spiritcat 8y ago
      na everyone uses mate now
    - Avshalom 8y ago
      Gtk became "the default" because Qt had some dual licensing weirdness until qt3/qt4 (I didn't pay that much attention so don't quote me) and by that time several fundamental projects like Firefox, gimp(of course) and OpenOffice (koffice took until like ~09 to get production ready) had established gtk as the primary Linux toolkit Gnome just follows on because the gtk team is a very purple Venn diagram with the gnome team (at least for paid developers)
- vetinari 8y ago
  You see, the entire theme engine rework was to increase the stability of the framework. Injecting random theme code, as it done with Gtk2, does wonders to application stability. Not in a positive way, though.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Per curiosity, is the guilty extension a pomodoro app ?
jchw 8y ago
GNOME didn't break because its theme was effectively blessed, being updated roughly in lockstep with GTK. However, not every user of GTK exists inside of GNOME. Consider: - An app running in Windows or macOS - An app running inside of KDE or another desktop environment While the Adwaita theme certainly looks OK, having it be the only stable option is beyond absurd, and makes GTK 3 useless for anyone outside of GNOME, including GIMP, which I believe ironically was the origin of GTK itself to begin with. While I can't think of another example of where GTK broke other than theming, that doesn't really make it OK. Marking it unstable may effectively cover their ass for fulfilling their promises, but in my opinion that's ridiculous for an aspect of the library that literally can't be ignored.
- vetinari 8y ago
  GNOME doesn't have it's own theme, it uses whatever GTK uses, i.e. Adwaita by default. Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all. The reason why theming was unstable is, that it was being reimplemented. That's a thing you cannot do overnight, it takes some time. So if you want a theme that is not adwaita, you have to do exactly the same thing that the adwaita people did: update it for each release. Yes, that takes time too. Doing things in explicitly marked unstable internals of any framework will get you the authors protecting themselves against you. In Windows, the theme authors got signed themes, in MacOS they got SIP. Yes, it is not a insurmountable problem to avoid both, that's not their purpose, but when something breaks, it is obvious who's fault it is. GIMP is still Gtk 2 app, so it wasn't concerned with broken theming at all. They have their own work to do with the switch to GEGL.
  - hackbinary 8y ago
    >> Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all. https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/1f03599d1cf888f73a33363212b99905064e2c9e/src/main.c#L16 https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/1f03599d1cf888f73a... Seems to me that "#include <gtk/gtk.h>" means that gnome-shell does use gtk. Or maybe I am missing some nuance of your statement.

r3bl 8y ago

Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrading a GNOME extension resulted in the user session completely crashing, getting me back to the login screen, and making me lose about half an hour of work. Now, of course, I could put the blame on the sole developer that developed that specific extension (one of the preinstalled ones in Ubuntu now), but I don't. I blame GNOME that a botched extension update lead to the entire session crashing, instead of doing something normal (like reverting to the previous version and showing "update failed").

zzzcpan 8y ago
This fragility is architectural though and possibly even cultural now. People who promote gnome and make decisions adopting it for mainstream distros somehow believe that such poor level of quality is acceptable. It's how systemd got into mainstream too.
- jchw 8y ago
  Redhat has killed the Linux desktop with this kind of mentality. No matter what I do, things are broken nowadays. Wayland was broken promises; most of the same issues exist in Wayland still, except now sometimes pasting crashes my desktop, and I can't take screenshots without the compositor's permission. Systemd actually delivered on some of its promises, but not without some brutal side-effects. Same for PulseAudio really. I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. We did all of this refactoring, rebuilding, and yet... Where's heterogeneous graphics card support? Where's heterogeneous DPI support? Why does multiple desktops still suck? Even using all open source drivers, Linux feels dated and immature at the same time :( I miss feeling like it was ahead of Windows.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    RH management basically do not care, because most of this happens in Fedora. With RHEL, RH basically snapshots whatever churn that is happening in the larger Linux ecosystem, and maintains said snapshot for a decade or more.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      RHEL 7 is seeing changes in the DE version (Gnome 3.8 to 3.22) and other library changes within the 10 year support period so not frozen as much as RHEL 6. Swings and roundabouts.
  - bonzini 8y ago
    Heterogenous DPI is years ahead in Wayland than it is in Windows.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Can you explain the architectural details behind why this is?
  - hedora 8y ago
    > I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. Consider switching to BSD or Devuan (and donating time/money/bug-reports).
  - qplex 8y ago
    I haven't used RedHat since they started to charge for it. Fedora 27 was ok. I think Linux generally works on the desktop. It's true that GNOME 3 is still buggy. I've had Nautilus crash on me while copying files and other horrible things. Wayland hardly has any apps with native support, it crashes a lot and the hardware support sucks too. Also (afaik) applications such as Wine can never be ported to Wayland. However GNOME and Wayland are just one bleeding edge. If you run X with some stable WM or DE, things work so well it's almost boring.
    - 8y ago
- greenhouse_gas 8y ago
  Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.
  - spiritcat 8y ago
    na everyone uses mate now
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    Gtk became "the default" because Qt had some dual licensing weirdness until qt3/qt4 (I didn't pay that much attention so don't quote me) and by that time several fundamental projects like Firefox, gimp(of course) and OpenOffice (koffice took until like ~09 to get production ready) had established gtk as the primary Linux toolkit Gnome just follows on because the gtk team is a very purple Venn diagram with the gnome team (at least for paid developers)
vetinari 8y ago
You see, the entire theme engine rework was to increase the stability of the framework. Injecting random theme code, as it done with Gtk2, does wonders to application stability. Not in a positive way, though.
johnchristopher 8y ago
Per curiosity, is the guilty extension a pomodoro app ?

jchw 8y ago

GNOME didn't break because its theme was effectively blessed, being updated roughly in lockstep with GTK. However, not every user of GTK exists inside of GNOME. Consider: - An app running in Windows or macOS - An app running inside of KDE or another desktop environment While the Adwaita theme certainly looks OK, having it be the only stable option is beyond absurd, and makes GTK 3 useless for anyone outside of GNOME, including GIMP, which I believe ironically was the origin of GTK itself to begin with. While I can't think of another example of where GTK broke other than theming, that doesn't really make it OK. Marking it unstable may effectively cover their ass for fulfilling their promises, but in my opinion that's ridiculous for an aspect of the library that literally can't be ignored.

vetinari 8y ago
GNOME doesn't have it's own theme, it uses whatever GTK uses, i.e. Adwaita by default. Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all. The reason why theming was unstable is, that it was being reimplemented. That's a thing you cannot do overnight, it takes some time. So if you want a theme that is not adwaita, you have to do exactly the same thing that the adwaita people did: update it for each release. Yes, that takes time too. Doing things in explicitly marked unstable internals of any framework will get you the authors protecting themselves against you. In Windows, the theme authors got signed themes, in MacOS they got SIP. Yes, it is not a insurmountable problem to avoid both, that's not their purpose, but when something breaks, it is obvious who's fault it is. GIMP is still Gtk 2 app, so it wasn't concerned with broken theming at all. They have their own work to do with the switch to GEGL.
- hackbinary 8y ago
  >> Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all. https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/1f03599d1cf888f73a33363212b99905064e2c9e/src/main.c#L16 https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/1f03599d1cf888f73a... Seems to me that "#include <gtk/gtk.h>" means that gnome-shell does use gtk. Or maybe I am missing some nuance of your statement.