13 ms·

Please don’t theme our apps

169 points by forlorn 7y ago

anoncake 7y ago
> GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Bugs are bad, yes. > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. That is not a problem if you use icons for the purpose they are intended for. > Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Good. My computer is not your billboard. Consistency is more important than your "brand". > Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are not very useful if they look nothing like the real app does once you install it. > User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation. Nonsense. Theming doesn't affect the layout of a program. If people were that bad at abstraction, then how do they recognize they can sit on a metal chair if they are familiar with wooden ones? > They are built and tested for the upstream GNOME stylesheet, icons, and fonts, so that’s what they should look like on peoples’ systems. No. They should look like the user chooses them to look. One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like. > Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. ∀x. x without any QA is reckless.
- avianlyric 7y ago
  Did we read the same letter? This letter was aimed at distributions and theme developers not end users. Hell there’s even a paragraph aim directly at end users. > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. You’ve completely dismissed all of their concerns out of hand, in an entirely unhelpful and hostile manner. Why did you even bother writing a comment?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    > Why did you even bother writing a comment? Good question. Why did I write things like the following if you don't read it anyway? > One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    The parent correctly notes that theming is a valid feature of the platform, and asking essentially for ignoring the feature because of brand issues sounds ridiculous. It maybe 'unhelpful', but sometimes we just express our opinions here, not running consultancy services. It's called commentary section for a reason.
    - avianlyric 7y ago
      I don’t take issue with people expressing opinions, or even pointing out that theming is a platform feature. But I do take issue with attacking developers who write applications for free, and contribute to the Linux ecosystem, for making a reasonable request to platform developers.
      - loudtieblahblah 7y ago
        Just bc you wrote something doesn't give you the right to dictate how I use it on my personal machine.
        sp332 7y ago
        Again, this letter is not aimed at end users. "If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us."
        suby 7y ago
        This would absolutely impact end users when they can no longer find custom themes through their distro of choice. It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.
        onli 7y ago
        That paragraph continues. The letter is absolutely also aimed at end users: > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer. Just not with the same vehemence as its message directed at distros.
  - osrec 7y ago
    Totally agree. Users have the power to do what they want at the end of the day. What's annoying is when you install an app and by default you don't recognise it's icon because of theming. Or the menu text is suddenly the same colour as the background, thereby making it unreadable and unusable.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    But it's not fine with them; it's unsupported and they're openly hostile towards at least some users (distros) doing it.
- threeseed 7y ago
  The article had pretty clear examples of where theming went wrong. Themes are imposing a real cost on developers who let's be honest are doing the Linux platform a massive favour by even bothering to write apps for it. I hope the audience of that article are a little more sympathetic than yourself.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    The article has one valid example of a bug. If it's a bug in the application, writing an open letter about it is not helpful. If it's a bug in the theme, the application developer is just not responsible for it.
    - EdwardDiego 7y ago
      If you clicked through to the blog post linked in the article, you'd see more examples. https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a... >If it's a bug in the theme, the application developer is just not responsible for it. And how many times would they have to tell the end user who opened an issue on their app's tracker that?
      - anoncake 7y ago
        > And how many times would they have to tell the end user who opened an issue on their app's tracker that? I'm afraid there is no way around that issue with free software.
        allover 7y ago
        In this case the author is suggesting a way to avoid it, for distributions to not theme and introduce the bugs in the first place.
        oarsinsync 7y ago
        for distributions to not theme all third party applications by default, and for that to be a per-app user toggle.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  I'm using System76's Pop_OS icon theme in Gnome Shell, and like the clean look of it. It changes the icons for a good number of popular applications too, which results in everything looking neat and coherent. > Good. My computer is not your billboard. Yes, seriously. If a user runs a free software desktop, chances are the ability to change things according to their wishes is part of why they use it. > Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. Which is why I use a platform that does grant me that freedom as a user.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    And also why next year will eternally be the ‘year of Linux on the desktop’, until desktops don’t even exist anymore.
    - jake_the_third 7y ago
      If that's really the reason, then I and (likely) the majority of other Linux users are completely fine with that.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      To misquote Willy Brandt: There is no point in reaching the year of the Linux desktop at the price of it not being the Linux desktop anymore.
    - ricardobeat 7y ago
      To be clear, I’m responding to the affirmation that delivering app changes without any QA is acceptable. I’m not against open software or user customization, but this approach does not result in quality software. Distros should be working with application developers and not against them. Here you have a large group of Linux app developers undersigning a plea to stop breaking their software and all they get is scorn and dismissal. More Elementary, less winamp-skin-distros.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        > Here you have a large group of Linux app developers undersigning a plea to stop breaking their software and all they get is scorn and dismissal. Their letter is titled "Please don't theme our apps", not "Please don't break our apps".
- cuddlecake 7y ago
  Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric. The author presents valid and sensible issues with the state of theming on the GNOME platform. And the overarching topic is essentially User Experience. Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not the theme. Although many of the same design principles are used in the making of either a chair or a graphical user interface, they are definitely not the same in any regard. On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time. On top of that, icons can have different meaning depending on your background. Icons can be combined to form a composite icon, and now imagine one of those icons is not displayed as you intended it to be. The entire meaning can change because the design intentions are lost. On the topic of branding: it's not about your desktop being a billboard. It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems, and it's also - more or less - the only thing about the product that is not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are). And let's be honest: most apps we use in our day to day life have very tame brands and adhere to certain standards. That is because the apps we use are usually good, and we throw the bad, obnoxious ones away really quickly. All in all, the author presents valid concerns, especially if you don't project them on how you prefer your UI, but rather, how potential Linux / GNOME users could have additional difficulties because of theming issues.
  - loudtieblahblah 7y ago
    The fact gnome people are so draconian in controlling my user experience is why I stopped using that ghetto desktop environment and any environment dependent on it. It's bad enough gnome depending on systemd was the thing that forced systemd down all our throat, no matter the distro. It's bad enough that they made it hard or removed options to endless apps and the only way you can theme is essentially via a hack. Now you all are arguing we shouldn't theme at all. Godwins Law and all you're all a bunch of nazis.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    > Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric. Actually, it's dismissive of the app developers' egocentrism. In so far as theming breaks usability, they do have a point. Distributions shouldn't make potentially incompatible changes to the default theme without QA. But it's not all the fault of distributions and not respecting branding is not a UX problem. Yes, I may be too harsh towards people voluntarily writing free software. Developers putting their branding and their "vision" before usability and user control is just a major pet peeve of mine. And diplomacy is not my strong point. > Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not the theme. Actually I would blame the theme, but yeah, the average user would. Wrongly assigned blame is a broader issue with free software and the distribution system though. > On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time. The XDG Icon Naming Specification does not actually specify the names of concrete icons, but of meanings. For example, there is no "looking-glass" icon, but there is a "system-search" icon. If you use the "system-search" icon to display a looking glass because that's the metaphor the icon theme you're testing with uses, your application may display the wrong icon with a different icon theme. If an application needs an icon that is not standardized, it can include it similarly to its own application icon. > It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems No, it's about the user recognizing the application. Which they can. The Firefox icon the open letter used as an example is very much the Firefox icon, just in a different style. > it's also [...] not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are) Exactly. User experience >>> branding.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- the_other 7y ago
  If you develop for a system which permits theming, you have to include that use case in your design. You can’t complain about users making use of system features when you develop for that system.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Who are you to tell the app developer what they're require to support? It's open source. They don't owe you anything. They don't have to make their software work on Thursdays or work in Canada, let alone survive contact with a hundred weird and unpredictable themes.
- Asooka 7y ago
  And let's not forget that you need theming support so your OS can accommodate people with different vision requirements. So you can have a low-contrast theme, and a high-contrast theme, and a red-green colour-blind theme and so on. And let's not forget people who need a large text theme. Remember 15 years ago when we were so proud of GTK for being able to dynamically adjust for all these things (as opposed to Windows's half-assed support)? Remember when user experience was more important than designer vision? Remember when we all solved the problem of separating the data from the presentation? Remember when GUIs were written with a particular look in mind, but could adjust for various themes? There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort. Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort. The Web. It comes from the Web. Web development has this bullshit school of UI/UX design that prioritizes branding, dark patterns, and treating users like toddlers, at the expense of making the software functional and usable. Since we all get industry news from the Web, the Web patterns are the most well-known, and they pollute desktop software development too (doubly so when desktop software is nowadays built as webpages bundled to a browser runtime). It's not that the Web school of UX is completely wrong; the problem is that it mixes ergonomics with a whole range of tricks designed to make the software more popular and more sellable in spite of the utility reduction they cause, and then sells the whole bundle as "scientifically validated" and "data driven".
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Yeah. People say one of the problems with free software is that its UX is designed by programmers rather than UX designers. Which makes sense, because UX designers should be able to design a good UX. But not if they don't even try.
- asark 7y ago
  Oof. When I read the headline I though it was a call for app developers to stop making a bunch of custom-themed BS when the built-in widgets and styles will do, saving themselves money and the users headaches. This is the opposite of that, and, you're right, is nonsense.
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  >Good. My computer is not your billboard. Consistency is more important than your "brand". completely agree with this point.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > My computer is not your billboard. It's also not the distro's billboard, but you seem happy for them to impose their branding upon your desktop, even if they break functionality.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Your assertion is incorrect. Even if it weren't, giving my distro permission to brand my desktop would not give anyone else the right to do the same.
Arctaire 7y ago
I feel like an "open letter" is a pretty odd way to ask something of the maintainers of distributions that do not install GNOME with its stock Adwaita theme. Indeed, despite being created some two weeks ago, the (small) notice at the top that this particular open letter is aimed only at distribution maintainers was only added yesterday[1]. How many do so, anyway? I know Ubuntu has the Yaru[2] theme by default. I'll add that I personally find the stock Adwaita theme to be total garbage. I've been using the Vimix dark themes[3] for as long as I can remember because they don't make the title bar of windows 30 storeys tall and they don't use beige. 1. https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/commit/72fb77415c5f5dfe8fdee3a183cedf2024d1b21e https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/commi... 2. https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru 3. https://github.com/vinceliuice/vimix-gtk-themes https://github.com/vinceliuice/vimix-gtk-themes
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  System76's Pop_OS version of Ubuntu with Gnome Shell comes with a very nice theme too.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You don't write an open letter when you want to ask someone something; you write one when you want to force them to do things your way by creating a public shitstorm.
- derefr 7y ago
  > I'll add that I personally find the stock Adwaita theme to be total garbage. I mean, it doesn't really matter if it's garbage or not; it matters that it's what GNOME app developers are testing their UX against, so if you create a theme that changes the metrics drastically from the ones in Adwaita, your theme is going to break those apps. You can probably get away with tweaks on color, squashing some elements narrower, whatever, but that's not what the post is really talking about. Things that could be called "variations on Adwaita", or "Adwaita if it had a fancy control panel with metrics sliders and color pickers", aren't gonna break anyone's apps. They're talking about themes that e.g. change fonts on control labels to ones that don't have the same em-widths or x-heights for some characters, and so things stop lining up flush; or which replacing the icons with an icon set that isn't just "the same icon designs but now in monochrome/superflat/etc." but now has new designs, different to the same degree that the iOS vs. Android emoji themes are different, such that your gun becomes a water gun (or your homedir becomes a hand throwing devil-horns.)
quantummkv 7y ago
This is more of an indictment of the way GTK3+ handles theming (or lack of it). GNOME/GTK devs, as usual, got confused and implemented something no one wants. Either you provide a proper and defined way to theme like KDE does or take the windows/mac route and tell developers to recreate any custom themed control from scratch. Instead, they go around saying that there is only one GTK theme and then leave a convenient backdoor open for hacks with a nudge and a wink. Either open the front door and roll out a carpet or close all the doors and windows.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > This is more of an indictment of the way GTK3+ handles theming (or lack of it). How do you think GTK+3 handles theming (or lacks handling for it)? It sounds like you're confusing GTK+3 theming for GTK+2 theming (which was based on "engines", which were quite a mess). Now it's very "proper and defined", it's accomplished with a strict subset of CSS which has fairly consistent behaviour. I personally don't see the point in elaborate theming systems (I'd prefer to just have control over the colours, and maybe one or two of the spacing variables), and it is obvious that they cost a lot of cycles at run time.... but GTK+3's theming system is not braindead, it's just ambitious.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    > I personally don't see the point in elaborate theming systems (I'd prefer to just have control over the colours, and maybe one or two of the spacing variables), and it is obvious that they cost a lot of cycles at run time.... Consistency and overriding bad decisions.
  - quantummkv 7y ago
    Um no, because gtk/gnome devs have explicitly stated that Adwaita is the one true gtk theme. The name "Adwaita" reflects it. In GTK3+, the concept of themes does not exist. This is why you need 3rd party tools to change them. This is why 3rd party themes break stuff that this article complains about.
  - spronkey 7y ago
lousken 7y ago
Icon themes - should be more standardized, that's true. GTK stylesheets - mostly a problem of different GTK versions they're made for, because GTK versioning is a mess. App Icons - so what? I think most people like consistency - look at Windows 10 and its ~4years of development, it's still a mess and if I had an option I'd switch right away All in all I think the choice should be left on the user after distro install, use default gnome look by default and have an option to switch to another with a warning. I agree that devs shouldn't have to deal with someones custom stylesheet issues.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > Icon themes - should be more standardized, that's true. Why? There is already a standard. It does not specify what icons look like, but what they mean. Replacing an icon with another that has the same meaning is not a problem. Of course, if you, say, abuse the "system-search" icon to show a looking glass, this will not work with a theme using a different metaphor. The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage. Using it as an an example is like saying distributions should not change the default font because they might choose Wingdings.
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    > The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage. A lot of icon themes are pure garbage, or at least incomplete. I don't think the example chosen here is any worse than what I've seen on my own system. Honestly, most icon themes are a failure; visual metaphors are just plain hard, and there's no substitute for literacy.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      True. But what about the icon themes major distributions pick?
      - JasonFruit 7y ago
        That's fair; the major distributions usually choose better themes. There are also minor distributions, however…
random45345 7y ago
The whole letter sounds weird when talking about free software. Software freedom main benefit is that the user can change the software. Theming it is probably the most accessible form of modification and should be celebrated. Asking not to theme is contrary to the free software ethos itself. The situation is even more tricky as what is being modified is not even the software itself but the system dependencies. Essentially the developers in this letter say: do not run our software on an environment that is not the one we support (in practice fedora or a close clone of it) and if you create a distro make sure its a clone of what we support. I understand the fact that developers do not want to support bugs due to user modifications and strange environments. Free software doesn't imply free support so they can put any restriction on what they want to do. The letter however would have been much less weird if it said "we cannot ensure quality of software X except on our build running on a supported environment, if you run the software elsewhere or with changes (and theming is a change) please don't call it X to avoid confusion and remember you are on your own". What Firefox did I think its a smart solution to this problem. " We offer Firefox on platform x,y,z. If you build it on something else, call it something else, if you run it on another platform remember you're on your own".
- turbinerneiter 7y ago
  This isn't about the user theming. It's about distros theming. There currently is a growing conflict between upstream developers and distributions, because some of their interactions and dependencies bare badly managed. For example, upstream maintainers see an influx of bug reports and angry users due to bugs, where the distributions are at fault. Sources for this can be changes to the code that the distributions make for various reasons like backwards compatibility, themes that break user interfaces or simply outdated packages or missing backports. The GNOME upstream maintainers all are having their ass hanging out on a public gitlab repo, while some of the distributors, who break stuff, are very hard to find, with sometimes ancient bugtrackers. I trust that the community will find a way to update their relationships and solve these issues, but it starts with seeing what's going wrong and where we have bad incentive structures.
  - anoncake 7y ago
cotelletta 7y ago
Trying to explain to hardcore techies the value of consistent design and workflow is fruitless in my experience. They want full control over everything, even the things they are not experts in, and will put together byzantine Rube Goldberg machines to do it. And then chastise you for not seeing how "easy" it is to build and maintain. The complexity and effort you need to put in to make these situations work is a feature, not a bug. Wouldn't want things to just work, you'd have all this free time to not think about computers, like a scrub. Had this argument plenty of times before. Even when the resulting mess takes twice as long to work with, they prefer it because of [vague handwavey objection that will be replaced by another one as soon as you refute it]. You cannot do design by numbers, and you cannot approach it like a programmer. The kind of sameness you want in design is a different kind than in code.
- Legogris 7y ago
  > The kind of sameness you want in design is a different kind than in code. Maybe me, as a user, don't want your sameness. Why are you arguing that users should use things differently if they're happy with their own way, even if it's suboptimal in your opinion? It's completely fine to hide certain configuration flags in "dev mode" sections and put warnings that you don't provide support for anything but default configuration of them. If your users want to be on their own, you have no responsibility to solve all their problems as long as you are explicit with what you support and not.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > Trying to explain to hardcore techies the value of consistent design and workflow is fruitless in my experience. Theming doesn't even affect workflows. Since not all applications use GTK, it's necessary if you want a halfway consistent design. Respecting applications' branding is just the opposite of consistency.
draw_down 7y ago
This is so confusing. Why build for a system that does this, then? Separately, isn’t the point of all this that people have freedom to do what they want with their system? And honestly, complaining about the harm to your brand, come on. Give me a break.
781 7y ago
Write the app in Electron. Problem solved. No more OS overriding your look.
- Legogris 7y ago
  I can see why the Electron-haters are downvoting you, but you're completely right. Don't build your apps in GTK if you don't want to have overridden GTK configurations affect your UI. I would really like Electron to add an on-by-default standard interface to override CSS rules for Electron apps, though. (I don't have a horse in the Electron-is-great-or-crap race)
  - 781 7y ago
    > I would really Electron to add an on-by-default standard interface to override CSS rules for Electron apps That's a hard problem to solve, since there are many ways of styling Electron - Bootstrap/Bulma/Material Design/custom stuff. So it's hard to just override CSS rules. On the other hand, it's the kind of problem perfectly suited for Machine Learning - just take the whole screenshot/image of the app and use a stylistic ML to change it - make it Dark Theme/whatever... I suspect in 10 years OSes will support ML-based automatic themeing/customization of all apps, regardless of what they are written in.
    - Legogris 7y ago
      The exact same argument could be made for web apps, but we still have userChrome.css and userContent.css which solves this neatly.
      - 781 7y ago
        How many are actually using that? I don't know anybody. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-and-usercontent-css-disabled-by-default/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-...
        7y ago
emilfihlman 7y ago
>App Icons are the identity of an app. Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Yeah so, this is bullshit. Why would anyone have any say what my computer looks like.
code_duck 7y ago
It reminds me of how Reddit allows subs to put in their own stylesheets. Each sub can change the look, placement, and existence of just about every UI element. It makes for the most inconsistent interface I've ever seen for a website.
- Zak 7y ago
  The redisign used for new.reddit.com doesn't give moderators as much control, much to the displeasure of many of us who have been on the platform for a long time. Although I dislike it when people significantly change UI controls.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    I always have custom CSS disabled for all subs. The designs are amusing, some are well done, and it's nice that people put effort into designs. However, as I was saying it makes for a terrible and confusing UI experience. Also some designs are intentionally jarring or annoying, and themes often omit elements.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    I can't think of any CSS styles that are actually outright bad, though, unless it's intentional (like with /r/crappydesign or /r/ooer).
    - code_duck 7y ago
      Just the inconsistency makes it very unusable.
      - spronkey 7y ago
        I respectfully disagree for the large part. My own brain seems to have no issue coupling functionality to visual design. Yes it's probably less optimal for novice-to-expert transition than having colour variants, but conversely it also gives stronger immediate affordance as to what subreddit you're using..
gmueckl 7y ago
Color themes seem like a brilliant idea until hit the point where your custom control needs this one extra distinct highlight or background color to convey state. Then you're out of luck. You only have bad options left: opt out of system theming and enforce your own or hardcode a color (or put it into the settings dialog) and accept that it breaks with any non-default theme out there because no user will take time to look at the settings and fiddle with the colors. Either way, any usability benefit from good default themes (e.g. high contrast themes) is pretty much gone.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Or you use the extra distinct highlight or background color the system theme specifies.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    That is not enough. What if I need three clearly distinguishable background colors to convey different states for list entries?
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Then you should fix your app so it can be used by color-blind users. Aside from that, you should use distinguishable background colors A, B and C specified by the system color theme. It's more likely that its designer has considered accessibility issues than that every single app developer has.
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        Have you looked at the set of colors that is actually defined by a theme? That is my point: I would use these colors gladly if they were there. They aren't.
- adamzochowski 7y ago
  There are two solutions to this: 1) use offset colours, like specifying to move 10% in Hue off the theme colour. 2) specify all foreground + background colours and admit that this is special and won't conform to any user or distro theming
core1024 7y ago
I agree that changing default icons is sometimes confusing. The user have hard times finding an app. Especially apps like Geany, Firefox and VLC get so weird icons in some themes that you can't visually confirm that this is the correct app. I also agree that if you make an app screenshot/tutorial it is better to use the default theme unless you are targeting users for specific distro. However I see some flaws in Adwaita (the default GTK theme) and a lot other themes regarding the titlebars: 1. They are too tall for no obvious reason. 2. the most irritating thing is that it is very hard to tell the active window. I mean it is a bit lighter but that's all.
Legogris 7y ago
I couldn't disagree more. If the user wants the intended experience, they will not apply a different theme for your app. The whole reason a user has applied a different theme on your app is because they disagree with your choices and that's totally fine. What's next, asking Mozilla to take down user style sheets and extensions that restyle web apps? This article is antithetical to the whole cultural foundation that GNOME builds on, without which there would probably not be an open source desktop ecosystem to build apps for. I strongly urge the authors to take in the arguments of the top comments and reevaluate their positions. And you know what? The more you enable and facilitate customization, the better and richer will the options provided by the community be. I can see how the argument makes sense for particular distributions like Elementary OS and maybe Linux Mint that are aiming at a unified experience for novice users. I really hope other distro maintainers don't pay attention.
- barrkel 7y ago
  I don't think you read the article. It's not complaining about users.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  They're specifically talking to distros in the letter, not end users. If you want to install your own custom theme, fine. But if you're a distro shipping a custom theme, when it breaks a 3rd party app, the app gets the blame, not the distro.
  - Legogris 7y ago
    > On a platform level, we believe GTK should stop forcing a single stylesheet on all apps by default. Instead of apps having to opt out of this by hardcoding a stylesheet, they should use the platform stylesheet unless they opt in to something else. This is what I take issue with as a user. A major reason why I prefer GTK is exactly because I can get a homogenous look without having to tweak every single app individually. There are definitely issues with the way this is handled (and I'm TBH still confused about squaring Qt and GTK styles), but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
elagost 7y ago
This is insane. The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever). Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.
taosx 7y ago
As an end user I never had any of the mentioned users. On some rare occasions when the state of my distro was probably too unique, I had some problems, but that's why I use linux.
NyashMyash 7y ago
Bullshit. I need dark theme and I don't care about "brands" nor "identity". Stop burning my eyes please.
- anoncake 7y ago
  I think a dark theme is the one thing Gnome supports aside from the default.
coleifer 7y ago
The gnome/gtk team introduces breaking changes to the styles and themes all the time. I think this is misplaced outrage. One of the things I like most about gtk apps is the ability to theme them to achieve a uniform look across all my apps. I would rather use a slightly less functional gtk app than a qt/kde thing for this reason. Users who care enough to mess with themes by necessity accept that sometimes things may need some tweaking. Most popular themes are on gh and have responsive maintainers who are invested in their themes looking good/uniform. The burden should be placed on the theme maintainers and the users who choose to use non-default configuration, rather than disabling themes on an ad-hoc basis.
Pxtl 7y ago
I could see a very similar article written for "please stop letting users resize the window" or "please stop letting users change font size"
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Yeah. This has a whiff of that "let me disable the back button!" whining from 1990s webdevs.
faissaloo 7y ago
On the contrary, I think GNOME allows people too much freedom to theme and it opens the system up to really broken theming. One of the things I love about Serenity OS is that it has one simple theming engine so everything looks the way you'd expect between applications.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > On the contrary, I think GNOME allows people too much freedom Freedom is kind of the point of free software.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    The ability to run what you want and modify what you want is different from design freedom.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Indeed. Keeping people from modifying their software affects only developers, keeping people from choosing a theme affects every user. The ability to use what software you want, however, isn't much different from the ability to use what theme you want. And ultimately, freedom is not specifically about running the software you want, or about modifying software, but about doing what you want.
      - faissaloo 7y ago
        The ability to use whatever theme you want has created a situation where Linux UI is in complete disarray. If you want a different UI you should obviously have that option, but there isn't a major UI system that takes the opposite approach, instead developer effort is being wasted on a feature that's always broken all the time and restricted to handful of working themes anyway.
        anoncake 7y ago
        > there isn't a major UI system that takes the opposite approach Good thing there is at least one then. Blindly cloning other "major UI systems", now that would be a waste of developer resources.
anotheryou 7y ago
Leave me my icons. Meh about the in-app theming. Probably should not be bundled, but sadly most OSS ist lacking in the front-end and can really use some polish.
jrockway 7y ago
Don't release your software under a free software license if you don't want redistributors to randomly add bugs. Just go work for Apple, or something.
PaulHoule 7y ago
Good luck. The GNOME "community" is notorious for never listening to anybody ever. Develop for Windows instead.
swiley 7y ago
This guy probably would have gotten an actual discussion if he had worded his argument a little more friendly.
twervle 7y ago
Somethings broken in the architecture if such a post is required.
traverseda 7y ago
It sounds like GTK theming is broken.
jchw 7y ago
It’s weird how theming seems to have never been an issue for decades on KDE and KDE apps. It’s almost as though it’s a technology issue.
wheybags 7y ago
I honestly think we just need to have light and dark modes built in. If you want to modify the dark theme a bit, go ahead, but since the original dev knew the background should be dark and the foreground light, it should be OK. The problem is when people implicitly assume a light theme, but then use a dark one. If we could "tag" a theme as light or dark, a lot of this problem would go away.
- xhgdvjky 7y ago
  Seems kind of like how Mac handles this.
- spronkey 7y ago
  I think you're onto something, but I don't think it's as simple as just having a "light theme" and a "dark theme". I think that if we're going to have toolkits that support custom, nested widgets, those widgets need to be designed to support the context they are in. There will always arise situations where normally-light widgets need to appear on a dark background, or vice versa. The nested path bar example is exactly this - it's a widget that supports a single context (light background), but is having two contexts forced on it by leaky style cascades (light text, but also light background). How about we bake the concept of "light" and "dark" into the widgets themselves and take advantage of the cascading nature to switch the theme of a widget depending on the context it is in. Realistically though, GNOME 3 was rather short-sighted when it came to themes. Windows 95 showed us the way 24 years ago: you can change the colours of anything you want. You can tweak the size of most things. You can change the fonts. You can change the icons. Simple API that gets applied on top of an existing theme. Expand this for 2019 with dark and light variants for each theme, and I bet we'd satisfy almost all users.
eximius 7y ago
Okay, this is maybe more reasonable than I expected. I believe distros shipping non-default stylesheets are the target here? They seem to explicitly acknowledge users can do whatever they want. > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer. Which is a sentiment I can get behind. Telling distributors that they need to make it clear the styling might break things is not wholly unreasonable.
finchisko 7y ago
Electron app developers arise :). You don't have distro theming issues, do you? :D And now seriously. If linux developers turn away from native ui libs (like KDE or GNOME), this might be one of the reasons. The other option is specifically ban disrespectful distros in the license terms. I strongly believe in freedom (but not as GNU - absolute user freedom). Freedom IMO should be on both sides. If app developers doesn't want his/her app to be themed, then we should respect that. Our freedom is too look somewhere else to satisfy our need.
thanatos_dem 7y ago
Please make Linux apps less ugly. The visual design is always a decade behind mainstream OSes.
Avamander 7y ago
Yikes. I'll stop themeing apps and their icons once I don't see a single piece of software that has an UI and an icon look like as it were made in the 90s, also implement dark theme. Providing a more consistent UI for new users on a distro is also better idea than leaving it up for the developers. The GNOME back button being wrongly themed is solved by switching GNOME to dark mode (`gnome-tweak-tool`) and a dark theme. The engine isn't the best but devs don't make it easy either.
huxflux 7y ago
Don't theme, well then start to hire/team along with proper designers then (graphical/UI/UX).
nycticorax 7y ago
I have a lot of sympathy for the signers of this letter. As Havoc Pennington (team lead of the GNOME 2 project) liked to point out, every option you provide to users has a cost to the developers in terms of testing and maintenance. Maybe a better way for the letter signers to communicate their position would be to simply say "We don't support nonstandard GNOME themes". Certainly, they're within their rights to say this, and you're within your rights to not use their apps if you don't like it. Another thing Havoc Pennington liked to talk about in developing GNOME 2 was 'crack'. These were things in GNOME 1 that were bad for the community, but that a lot of users were addicted to. Like, for instance, an overabundance of user settings. By all accounts, it's hard to write a GUI app for the Linux desktop, in part because of the huge variety of distros and desktops, and apparently even themes within a single desktop. And as a user, my biggest complaint about desktop Linux is the relative paucity of high-quality applications. (Yes, I know there are many high-quality desktop Linux applications. But there aren't as many as on Windows or MacOS.) I can't help but wonder if most of the community wouldn't be better off if a single distro, hopefully with a single desktop and a single theme, decisively 'won' and claimed a dominant usage share of the Linux desktop. Then third-party developers would be incentivized to just develop for that distro, which might make the lives of both users and developers better in the long run. And of course, since it's open source, if 'the one true distro' went off the rails eventually, someone else could fork it and become the new 'one true distro', with relatively little danger of vendor lock-in.
- nycticorax 7y ago
  This blog post provides rebuttals to some of the points made in this comment thread: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a... That blog post was linked to from here: https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issues/7 https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issue...

169 points by forlorn 7y ago

> GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Bugs are bad, yes. > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. That is not a problem if you use icons for the purpose they are intended for. > Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Good. My computer is not your billboard. Consistency is more important than your "brand". > Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are not very useful if they look nothing like the real app does once you install it. > User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation. Nonsense. Theming doesn't affect the layout of a program. If people were that bad at abstraction, then how do they recognize they can sit on a metal chair if they are familiar with wooden ones? > They are built and tested for the upstream GNOME stylesheet, icons, and fonts, so that’s what they should look like on peoples’ systems. No. They should look like the user chooses them to look. One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like. > Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. ∀x. x without any QA is reckless.

avianlyric 7y ago
Did we read the same letter? This letter was aimed at distributions and theme developers not end users. Hell there’s even a paragraph aim directly at end users. > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. You’ve completely dismissed all of their concerns out of hand, in an entirely unhelpful and hostile manner. Why did you even bother writing a comment?
- anoncake 7y ago
  > Why did you even bother writing a comment? Good question. Why did I write things like the following if you don't read it anyway? > One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like.
- brokenkebab 7y ago
  The parent correctly notes that theming is a valid feature of the platform, and asking essentially for ignoring the feature because of brand issues sounds ridiculous. It maybe 'unhelpful', but sometimes we just express our opinions here, not running consultancy services. It's called commentary section for a reason.
  - avianlyric 7y ago
    I don’t take issue with people expressing opinions, or even pointing out that theming is a platform feature. But I do take issue with attacking developers who write applications for free, and contribute to the Linux ecosystem, for making a reasonable request to platform developers.
    - loudtieblahblah 7y ago
      Just bc you wrote something doesn't give you the right to dictate how I use it on my personal machine.
      - sp332 7y ago
        Again, this letter is not aimed at end users. "If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us."
        suby 7y ago
        This would absolutely impact end users when they can no longer find custom themes through their distro of choice. It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.
        onli 7y ago
        That paragraph continues. The letter is absolutely also aimed at end users: > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer. Just not with the same vehemence as its message directed at distros.
- osrec 7y ago
  Totally agree. Users have the power to do what they want at the end of the day. What's annoying is when you install an app and by default you don't recognise it's icon because of theming. Or the menu text is suddenly the same colour as the background, thereby making it unreadable and unusable.
- dleslie 7y ago
  But it's not fine with them; it's unsupported and they're openly hostile towards at least some users (distros) doing it.
threeseed 7y ago
The article had pretty clear examples of where theming went wrong. Themes are imposing a real cost on developers who let's be honest are doing the Linux platform a massive favour by even bothering to write apps for it. I hope the audience of that article are a little more sympathetic than yourself.
- anoncake 7y ago
  The article has one valid example of a bug. If it's a bug in the application, writing an open letter about it is not helpful. If it's a bug in the theme, the application developer is just not responsible for it.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    If you clicked through to the blog post linked in the article, you'd see more examples. https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a... >If it's a bug in the theme, the application developer is just not responsible for it. And how many times would they have to tell the end user who opened an issue on their app's tracker that?
    - anoncake 7y ago
      > And how many times would they have to tell the end user who opened an issue on their app's tracker that? I'm afraid there is no way around that issue with free software.
      - allover 7y ago
        In this case the author is suggesting a way to avoid it, for distributions to not theme and introduce the bugs in the first place.
        oarsinsync 7y ago
        for distributions to not theme all third party applications by default, and for that to be a per-app user toggle.
Freak_NL 7y ago
I'm using System76's Pop_OS icon theme in Gnome Shell, and like the clean look of it. It changes the icons for a good number of popular applications too, which results in everything looking neat and coherent. > Good. My computer is not your billboard. Yes, seriously. If a user runs a free software desktop, chances are the ability to change things according to their wishes is part of why they use it. > Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. Which is why I use a platform that does grant me that freedom as a user.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  And also why next year will eternally be the ‘year of Linux on the desktop’, until desktops don’t even exist anymore.
  - jake_the_third 7y ago
    If that's really the reason, then I and (likely) the majority of other Linux users are completely fine with that.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    To misquote Willy Brandt: There is no point in reaching the year of the Linux desktop at the price of it not being the Linux desktop anymore.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    To be clear, I’m responding to the affirmation that delivering app changes without any QA is acceptable. I’m not against open software or user customization, but this approach does not result in quality software. Distros should be working with application developers and not against them. Here you have a large group of Linux app developers undersigning a plea to stop breaking their software and all they get is scorn and dismissal. More Elementary, less winamp-skin-distros.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      > Here you have a large group of Linux app developers undersigning a plea to stop breaking their software and all they get is scorn and dismissal. Their letter is titled "Please don't theme our apps", not "Please don't break our apps".
cuddlecake 7y ago
Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric. The author presents valid and sensible issues with the state of theming on the GNOME platform. And the overarching topic is essentially User Experience. Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not the theme. Although many of the same design principles are used in the making of either a chair or a graphical user interface, they are definitely not the same in any regard. On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time. On top of that, icons can have different meaning depending on your background. Icons can be combined to form a composite icon, and now imagine one of those icons is not displayed as you intended it to be. The entire meaning can change because the design intentions are lost. On the topic of branding: it's not about your desktop being a billboard. It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems, and it's also - more or less - the only thing about the product that is not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are). And let's be honest: most apps we use in our day to day life have very tame brands and adhere to certain standards. That is because the apps we use are usually good, and we throw the bad, obnoxious ones away really quickly. All in all, the author presents valid concerns, especially if you don't project them on how you prefer your UI, but rather, how potential Linux / GNOME users could have additional difficulties because of theming issues.
- loudtieblahblah 7y ago
  The fact gnome people are so draconian in controlling my user experience is why I stopped using that ghetto desktop environment and any environment dependent on it. It's bad enough gnome depending on systemd was the thing that forced systemd down all our throat, no matter the distro. It's bad enough that they made it hard or removed options to endless apps and the only way you can theme is essentially via a hack. Now you all are arguing we shouldn't theme at all. Godwins Law and all you're all a bunch of nazis.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > Your entire comment feels awfully dismissive and egocentric. Actually, it's dismissive of the app developers' egocentrism. In so far as theming breaks usability, they do have a point. Distributions shouldn't make potentially incompatible changes to the default theme without QA. But it's not all the fault of distributions and not respecting branding is not a UX problem. Yes, I may be too harsh towards people voluntarily writing free software. Developers putting their branding and their "vision" before usability and user control is just a major pet peeve of mine. And diplomacy is not my strong point. > Even the slightest change in color can introduce friction between UI elements. Or to be more extreme, if a theme turns your entire app into a white blurry mess, you would get mad at the application, and not the theme. Actually I would blame the theme, but yeah, the average user would. Wrongly assigned blame is a broader issue with free software and the distribution system though. > On the topic of icons: just like language, they evolve over time. The XDG Icon Naming Specification does not actually specify the names of concrete icons, but of meanings. For example, there is no "looking-glass" icon, but there is a "system-search" icon. If you use the "system-search" icon to display a looking glass because that's the metaphor the icon theme you're testing with uses, your application may display the wrong icon with a different icon theme. If an application needs an icon that is not standardized, it can include it similarly to its own application icon. > It's about being able to recognize the brand across different operating systems No, it's about the user recognizing the application. Which they can. The Firefox icon the open letter used as an example is very much the Firefox icon, just in a different style. > it's also [...] not designed for the purpose of user experience (but in a sense, they still are) Exactly. User experience >>> branding.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
the_other 7y ago
If you develop for a system which permits theming, you have to include that use case in your design. You can’t complain about users making use of system features when you develop for that system.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Who are you to tell the app developer what they're require to support? It's open source. They don't owe you anything. They don't have to make their software work on Thursdays or work in Canada, let alone survive contact with a hundred weird and unpredictable themes.
Asooka 7y ago
And let's not forget that you need theming support so your OS can accommodate people with different vision requirements. So you can have a low-contrast theme, and a high-contrast theme, and a red-green colour-blind theme and so on. And let's not forget people who need a large text theme. Remember 15 years ago when we were so proud of GTK for being able to dynamically adjust for all these things (as opposed to Windows's half-assed support)? Remember when user experience was more important than designer vision? Remember when we all solved the problem of separating the data from the presentation? Remember when GUIs were written with a particular look in mind, but could adjust for various themes? There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort. Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort. The Web. It comes from the Web. Web development has this bullshit school of UI/UX design that prioritizes branding, dark patterns, and treating users like toddlers, at the expense of making the software functional and usable. Since we all get industry news from the Web, the Web patterns are the most well-known, and they pollute desktop software development too (doubly so when desktop software is nowadays built as webpages bundled to a browser runtime). It's not that the Web school of UX is completely wrong; the problem is that it mixes ergonomics with a whole range of tricks designed to make the software more popular and more sellable in spite of the utility reduction they cause, and then sells the whole bundle as "scientifically validated" and "data driven".
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Yeah. People say one of the problems with free software is that its UX is designed by programmers rather than UX designers. Which makes sense, because UX designers should be able to design a good UX. But not if they don't even try.
asark 7y ago
Oof. When I read the headline I though it was a call for app developers to stop making a bunch of custom-themed BS when the built-in widgets and styles will do, saving themselves money and the users headaches. This is the opposite of that, and, you're right, is nonsense.
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
>Good. My computer is not your billboard. Consistency is more important than your "brand". completely agree with this point.
DanBC 7y ago
> My computer is not your billboard. It's also not the distro's billboard, but you seem happy for them to impose their branding upon your desktop, even if they break functionality.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anoncake 7y ago
  Your assertion is incorrect. Even if it weren't, giving my distro permission to brand my desktop would not give anyone else the right to do the same.

Arctaire 7y ago

I feel like an "open letter" is a pretty odd way to ask something of the maintainers of distributions that do not install GNOME with its stock Adwaita theme. Indeed, despite being created some two weeks ago, the (small) notice at the top that this particular open letter is aimed only at distribution maintainers was only added yesterday[1]. How many do so, anyway? I know Ubuntu has the Yaru[2] theme by default. I'll add that I personally find the stock Adwaita theme to be total garbage. I've been using the Vimix dark themes[3] for as long as I can remember because they don't make the title bar of windows 30 storeys tall and they don't use beige. 1. https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/commit/72fb77415c5f5dfe8fdee3a183cedf2024d1b21e https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/commi... 2. https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru 3. https://github.com/vinceliuice/vimix-gtk-themes https://github.com/vinceliuice/vimix-gtk-themes

Freak_NL 7y ago
System76's Pop_OS version of Ubuntu with Gnome Shell comes with a very nice theme too.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
You don't write an open letter when you want to ask someone something; you write one when you want to force them to do things your way by creating a public shitstorm.
derefr 7y ago
> I'll add that I personally find the stock Adwaita theme to be total garbage. I mean, it doesn't really matter if it's garbage or not; it matters that it's what GNOME app developers are testing their UX against, so if you create a theme that changes the metrics drastically from the ones in Adwaita, your theme is going to break those apps. You can probably get away with tweaks on color, squashing some elements narrower, whatever, but that's not what the post is really talking about. Things that could be called "variations on Adwaita", or "Adwaita if it had a fancy control panel with metrics sliders and color pickers", aren't gonna break anyone's apps. They're talking about themes that e.g. change fonts on control labels to ones that don't have the same em-widths or x-heights for some characters, and so things stop lining up flush; or which replacing the icons with an icon set that isn't just "the same icon designs but now in monochrome/superflat/etc." but now has new designs, different to the same degree that the iOS vs. Android emoji themes are different, such that your gun becomes a water gun (or your homedir becomes a hand throwing devil-horns.)

quantummkv 7y ago

This is more of an indictment of the way GTK3+ handles theming (or lack of it). GNOME/GTK devs, as usual, got confused and implemented something no one wants. Either you provide a proper and defined way to theme like KDE does or take the windows/mac route and tell developers to recreate any custom themed control from scratch. Instead, they go around saying that there is only one GTK theme and then leave a convenient backdoor open for hacks with a nudge and a wink. Either open the front door and roll out a carpet or close all the doors and windows.

microcolonel 7y ago
> This is more of an indictment of the way GTK3+ handles theming (or lack of it). How do you think GTK+3 handles theming (or lacks handling for it)? It sounds like you're confusing GTK+3 theming for GTK+2 theming (which was based on "engines", which were quite a mess). Now it's very "proper and defined", it's accomplished with a strict subset of CSS which has fairly consistent behaviour. I personally don't see the point in elaborate theming systems (I'd prefer to just have control over the colours, and maybe one or two of the spacing variables), and it is obvious that they cost a lot of cycles at run time.... but GTK+3's theming system is not braindead, it's just ambitious.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > I personally don't see the point in elaborate theming systems (I'd prefer to just have control over the colours, and maybe one or two of the spacing variables), and it is obvious that they cost a lot of cycles at run time.... Consistency and overriding bad decisions.
- quantummkv 7y ago
  Um no, because gtk/gnome devs have explicitly stated that Adwaita is the one true gtk theme. The name "Adwaita" reflects it. In GTK3+, the concept of themes does not exist. This is why you need 3rd party tools to change them. This is why 3rd party themes break stuff that this article complains about.
- spronkey 7y ago

lousken 7y ago

Icon themes - should be more standardized, that's true. GTK stylesheets - mostly a problem of different GTK versions they're made for, because GTK versioning is a mess. App Icons - so what? I think most people like consistency - look at Windows 10 and its ~4years of development, it's still a mess and if I had an option I'd switch right away All in all I think the choice should be left on the user after distro install, use default gnome look by default and have an option to switch to another with a warning. I agree that devs shouldn't have to deal with someones custom stylesheet issues.

anoncake 7y ago
> Icon themes - should be more standardized, that's true. Why? There is already a standard. It does not specify what icons look like, but what they mean. Replacing an icon with another that has the same meaning is not a problem. Of course, if you, say, abuse the "system-search" icon to show a looking glass, this will not work with a theme using a different metaphor. The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage. Using it as an an example is like saying distributions should not change the default font because they might choose Wingdings.
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  > The icon theme displayed in the open letter is just garbage. A lot of icon themes are pure garbage, or at least incomplete. I don't think the example chosen here is any worse than what I've seen on my own system. Honestly, most icon themes are a failure; visual metaphors are just plain hard, and there's no substitute for literacy.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    True. But what about the icon themes major distributions pick?
    - JasonFruit 7y ago
      That's fair; the major distributions usually choose better themes. There are also minor distributions, however…

random45345 7y ago

The whole letter sounds weird when talking about free software. Software freedom main benefit is that the user can change the software. Theming it is probably the most accessible form of modification and should be celebrated. Asking not to theme is contrary to the free software ethos itself. The situation is even more tricky as what is being modified is not even the software itself but the system dependencies. Essentially the developers in this letter say: do not run our software on an environment that is not the one we support (in practice fedora or a close clone of it) and if you create a distro make sure its a clone of what we support. I understand the fact that developers do not want to support bugs due to user modifications and strange environments. Free software doesn't imply free support so they can put any restriction on what they want to do. The letter however would have been much less weird if it said "we cannot ensure quality of software X except on our build running on a supported environment, if you run the software elsewhere or with changes (and theming is a change) please don't call it X to avoid confusion and remember you are on your own". What Firefox did I think its a smart solution to this problem. " We offer Firefox on platform x,y,z. If you build it on something else, call it something else, if you run it on another platform remember you're on your own".

turbinerneiter 7y ago
This isn't about the user theming. It's about distros theming. There currently is a growing conflict between upstream developers and distributions, because some of their interactions and dependencies bare badly managed. For example, upstream maintainers see an influx of bug reports and angry users due to bugs, where the distributions are at fault. Sources for this can be changes to the code that the distributions make for various reasons like backwards compatibility, themes that break user interfaces or simply outdated packages or missing backports. The GNOME upstream maintainers all are having their ass hanging out on a public gitlab repo, while some of the distributors, who break stuff, are very hard to find, with sometimes ancient bugtrackers. I trust that the community will find a way to update their relationships and solve these issues, but it starts with seeing what's going wrong and where we have bad incentive structures.
- anoncake 7y ago

cotelletta 7y ago

Trying to explain to hardcore techies the value of consistent design and workflow is fruitless in my experience. They want full control over everything, even the things they are not experts in, and will put together byzantine Rube Goldberg machines to do it. And then chastise you for not seeing how "easy" it is to build and maintain. The complexity and effort you need to put in to make these situations work is a feature, not a bug. Wouldn't want things to just work, you'd have all this free time to not think about computers, like a scrub. Had this argument plenty of times before. Even when the resulting mess takes twice as long to work with, they prefer it because of [vague handwavey objection that will be replaced by another one as soon as you refute it]. You cannot do design by numbers, and you cannot approach it like a programmer. The kind of sameness you want in design is a different kind than in code.

Legogris 7y ago
> The kind of sameness you want in design is a different kind than in code. Maybe me, as a user, don't want your sameness. Why are you arguing that users should use things differently if they're happy with their own way, even if it's suboptimal in your opinion? It's completely fine to hide certain configuration flags in "dev mode" sections and put warnings that you don't provide support for anything but default configuration of them. If your users want to be on their own, you have no responsibility to solve all their problems as long as you are explicit with what you support and not.
anoncake 7y ago
> Trying to explain to hardcore techies the value of consistent design and workflow is fruitless in my experience. Theming doesn't even affect workflows. Since not all applications use GTK, it's necessary if you want a halfway consistent design. Respecting applications' branding is just the opposite of consistency.

draw_down 7y ago

This is so confusing. Why build for a system that does this, then? Separately, isn’t the point of all this that people have freedom to do what they want with their system? And honestly, complaining about the harm to your brand, come on. Give me a break.

781 7y ago

Write the app in Electron. Problem solved. No more OS overriding your look.

Legogris 7y ago
I can see why the Electron-haters are downvoting you, but you're completely right. Don't build your apps in GTK if you don't want to have overridden GTK configurations affect your UI. I would really like Electron to add an on-by-default standard interface to override CSS rules for Electron apps, though. (I don't have a horse in the Electron-is-great-or-crap race)
- 781 7y ago
  > I would really Electron to add an on-by-default standard interface to override CSS rules for Electron apps That's a hard problem to solve, since there are many ways of styling Electron - Bootstrap/Bulma/Material Design/custom stuff. So it's hard to just override CSS rules. On the other hand, it's the kind of problem perfectly suited for Machine Learning - just take the whole screenshot/image of the app and use a stylistic ML to change it - make it Dark Theme/whatever... I suspect in 10 years OSes will support ML-based automatic themeing/customization of all apps, regardless of what they are written in.
  - Legogris 7y ago
    The exact same argument could be made for web apps, but we still have userChrome.css and userContent.css which solves this neatly.
    - 781 7y ago
      How many are actually using that? I don't know anybody. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-and-usercontent-css-disabled-by-default/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-...
      - 7y ago

emilfihlman 7y ago

>App Icons are the identity of an app. Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. Yeah so, this is bullshit. Why would anyone have any say what my computer looks like.

code_duck 7y ago

It reminds me of how Reddit allows subs to put in their own stylesheets. Each sub can change the look, placement, and existence of just about every UI element. It makes for the most inconsistent interface I've ever seen for a website.

Zak 7y ago
The redisign used for new.reddit.com doesn't give moderators as much control, much to the displeasure of many of us who have been on the platform for a long time. Although I dislike it when people significantly change UI controls.
- code_duck 7y ago
  I always have custom CSS disabled for all subs. The designs are amusing, some are well done, and it's nice that people put effort into designs. However, as I was saying it makes for a terrible and confusing UI experience. Also some designs are intentionally jarring or annoying, and themes often omit elements.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I can't think of any CSS styles that are actually outright bad, though, unless it's intentional (like with /r/crappydesign or /r/ooer).
  - code_duck 7y ago
    Just the inconsistency makes it very unusable.
    - spronkey 7y ago
      I respectfully disagree for the large part. My own brain seems to have no issue coupling functionality to visual design. Yes it's probably less optimal for novice-to-expert transition than having colour variants, but conversely it also gives stronger immediate affordance as to what subreddit you're using..

gmueckl 7y ago

Color themes seem like a brilliant idea until hit the point where your custom control needs this one extra distinct highlight or background color to convey state. Then you're out of luck. You only have bad options left: opt out of system theming and enforce your own or hardcode a color (or put it into the settings dialog) and accept that it breaks with any non-default theme out there because no user will take time to look at the settings and fiddle with the colors. Either way, any usability benefit from good default themes (e.g. high contrast themes) is pretty much gone.

anoncake 7y ago
Or you use the extra distinct highlight or background color the system theme specifies.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  That is not enough. What if I need three clearly distinguishable background colors to convey different states for list entries?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Then you should fix your app so it can be used by color-blind users. Aside from that, you should use distinguishable background colors A, B and C specified by the system color theme. It's more likely that its designer has considered accessibility issues than that every single app developer has.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Have you looked at the set of colors that is actually defined by a theme? That is my point: I would use these colors gladly if they were there. They aren't.
adamzochowski 7y ago
There are two solutions to this: 1) use offset colours, like specifying to move 10% in Hue off the theme colour. 2) specify all foreground + background colours and admit that this is special and won't conform to any user or distro theming

core1024 7y ago

I agree that changing default icons is sometimes confusing. The user have hard times finding an app. Especially apps like Geany, Firefox and VLC get so weird icons in some themes that you can't visually confirm that this is the correct app. I also agree that if you make an app screenshot/tutorial it is better to use the default theme unless you are targeting users for specific distro. However I see some flaws in Adwaita (the default GTK theme) and a lot other themes regarding the titlebars: 1. They are too tall for no obvious reason. 2. the most irritating thing is that it is very hard to tell the active window. I mean it is a bit lighter but that's all.

Legogris 7y ago

I couldn't disagree more. If the user wants the intended experience, they will not apply a different theme for your app. The whole reason a user has applied a different theme on your app is because they disagree with your choices and that's totally fine. What's next, asking Mozilla to take down user style sheets and extensions that restyle web apps? This article is antithetical to the whole cultural foundation that GNOME builds on, without which there would probably not be an open source desktop ecosystem to build apps for. I strongly urge the authors to take in the arguments of the top comments and reevaluate their positions. And you know what? The more you enable and facilitate customization, the better and richer will the options provided by the community be. I can see how the argument makes sense for particular distributions like Elementary OS and maybe Linux Mint that are aiming at a unified experience for novice users. I really hope other distro maintainers don't pay attention.

barrkel 7y ago
I don't think you read the article. It's not complaining about users.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
They're specifically talking to distros in the letter, not end users. If you want to install your own custom theme, fine. But if you're a distro shipping a custom theme, when it breaks a 3rd party app, the app gets the blame, not the distro.
- Legogris 7y ago
  > On a platform level, we believe GTK should stop forcing a single stylesheet on all apps by default. Instead of apps having to opt out of this by hardcoding a stylesheet, they should use the platform stylesheet unless they opt in to something else. This is what I take issue with as a user. A major reason why I prefer GTK is exactly because I can get a homogenous look without having to tweak every single app individually. There are definitely issues with the way this is handled (and I'm TBH still confused about squaring Qt and GTK styles), but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

elagost 7y ago

This is insane. The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever). Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.

taosx 7y ago

As an end user I never had any of the mentioned users. On some rare occasions when the state of my distro was probably too unique, I had some problems, but that's why I use linux.

NyashMyash 7y ago

Bullshit. I need dark theme and I don't care about "brands" nor "identity". Stop burning my eyes please.

anoncake 7y ago
I think a dark theme is the one thing Gnome supports aside from the default.

coleifer 7y ago

The gnome/gtk team introduces breaking changes to the styles and themes all the time. I think this is misplaced outrage. One of the things I like most about gtk apps is the ability to theme them to achieve a uniform look across all my apps. I would rather use a slightly less functional gtk app than a qt/kde thing for this reason. Users who care enough to mess with themes by necessity accept that sometimes things may need some tweaking. Most popular themes are on gh and have responsive maintainers who are invested in their themes looking good/uniform. The burden should be placed on the theme maintainers and the users who choose to use non-default configuration, rather than disabling themes on an ad-hoc basis.

Pxtl 7y ago

I could see a very similar article written for "please stop letting users resize the window" or "please stop letting users change font size"

quotemstr 7y ago
Yeah. This has a whiff of that "let me disable the back button!" whining from 1990s webdevs.

faissaloo 7y ago

On the contrary, I think GNOME allows people too much freedom to theme and it opens the system up to really broken theming. One of the things I love about Serenity OS is that it has one simple theming engine so everything looks the way you'd expect between applications.

anoncake 7y ago
> On the contrary, I think GNOME allows people too much freedom Freedom is kind of the point of free software.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  The ability to run what you want and modify what you want is different from design freedom.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Indeed. Keeping people from modifying their software affects only developers, keeping people from choosing a theme affects every user. The ability to use what software you want, however, isn't much different from the ability to use what theme you want. And ultimately, freedom is not specifically about running the software you want, or about modifying software, but about doing what you want.
    - faissaloo 7y ago
      The ability to use whatever theme you want has created a situation where Linux UI is in complete disarray. If you want a different UI you should obviously have that option, but there isn't a major UI system that takes the opposite approach, instead developer effort is being wasted on a feature that's always broken all the time and restricted to handful of working themes anyway.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        > there isn't a major UI system that takes the opposite approach Good thing there is at least one then. Blindly cloning other "major UI systems", now that would be a waste of developer resources.

anotheryou 7y ago

Leave me my icons. Meh about the in-app theming. Probably should not be bundled, but sadly most OSS ist lacking in the front-end and can really use some polish.

jrockway 7y ago

Don't release your software under a free software license if you don't want redistributors to randomly add bugs. Just go work for Apple, or something.

PaulHoule 7y ago

Good luck. The GNOME "community" is notorious for never listening to anybody ever. Develop for Windows instead.

swiley 7y ago

This guy probably would have gotten an actual discussion if he had worded his argument a little more friendly.

twervle 7y ago

Somethings broken in the architecture if such a post is required.

traverseda 7y ago

It sounds like GTK theming is broken.

jchw 7y ago

It’s weird how theming seems to have never been an issue for decades on KDE and KDE apps. It’s almost as though it’s a technology issue.

wheybags 7y ago

I honestly think we just need to have light and dark modes built in. If you want to modify the dark theme a bit, go ahead, but since the original dev knew the background should be dark and the foreground light, it should be OK. The problem is when people implicitly assume a light theme, but then use a dark one. If we could "tag" a theme as light or dark, a lot of this problem would go away.

xhgdvjky 7y ago
Seems kind of like how Mac handles this.
spronkey 7y ago
I think you're onto something, but I don't think it's as simple as just having a "light theme" and a "dark theme". I think that if we're going to have toolkits that support custom, nested widgets, those widgets need to be designed to support the context they are in. There will always arise situations where normally-light widgets need to appear on a dark background, or vice versa. The nested path bar example is exactly this - it's a widget that supports a single context (light background), but is having two contexts forced on it by leaky style cascades (light text, but also light background). How about we bake the concept of "light" and "dark" into the widgets themselves and take advantage of the cascading nature to switch the theme of a widget depending on the context it is in. Realistically though, GNOME 3 was rather short-sighted when it came to themes. Windows 95 showed us the way 24 years ago: you can change the colours of anything you want. You can tweak the size of most things. You can change the fonts. You can change the icons. Simple API that gets applied on top of an existing theme. Expand this for 2019 with dark and light variants for each theme, and I bet we'd satisfy almost all users.

eximius 7y ago

Okay, this is maybe more reasonable than I expected. I believe distros shipping non-default stylesheets are the target here? They seem to explicitly acknowledge users can do whatever they want. > If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer. Which is a sentiment I can get behind. Telling distributors that they need to make it clear the styling might break things is not wholly unreasonable.

finchisko 7y ago

Electron app developers arise :). You don't have distro theming issues, do you? :D And now seriously. If linux developers turn away from native ui libs (like KDE or GNOME), this might be one of the reasons. The other option is specifically ban disrespectful distros in the license terms. I strongly believe in freedom (but not as GNU - absolute user freedom). Freedom IMO should be on both sides. If app developers doesn't want his/her app to be themed, then we should respect that. Our freedom is too look somewhere else to satisfy our need.

thanatos_dem 7y ago

Please make Linux apps less ugly. The visual design is always a decade behind mainstream OSes.

Avamander 7y ago

Yikes. I'll stop themeing apps and their icons once I don't see a single piece of software that has an UI and an icon look like as it were made in the 90s, also implement dark theme. Providing a more consistent UI for new users on a distro is also better idea than leaving it up for the developers. The GNOME back button being wrongly themed is solved by switching GNOME to dark mode (`gnome-tweak-tool`) and a dark theme. The engine isn't the best but devs don't make it easy either.

huxflux 7y ago

Don't theme, well then start to hire/team along with proper designers then (graphical/UI/UX).

nycticorax 7y ago

I have a lot of sympathy for the signers of this letter. As Havoc Pennington (team lead of the GNOME 2 project) liked to point out, every option you provide to users has a cost to the developers in terms of testing and maintenance. Maybe a better way for the letter signers to communicate their position would be to simply say "We don't support nonstandard GNOME themes". Certainly, they're within their rights to say this, and you're within your rights to not use their apps if you don't like it. Another thing Havoc Pennington liked to talk about in developing GNOME 2 was 'crack'. These were things in GNOME 1 that were bad for the community, but that a lot of users were addicted to. Like, for instance, an overabundance of user settings. By all accounts, it's hard to write a GUI app for the Linux desktop, in part because of the huge variety of distros and desktops, and apparently even themes within a single desktop. And as a user, my biggest complaint about desktop Linux is the relative paucity of high-quality applications. (Yes, I know there are many high-quality desktop Linux applications. But there aren't as many as on Windows or MacOS.) I can't help but wonder if most of the community wouldn't be better off if a single distro, hopefully with a single desktop and a single theme, decisively 'won' and claimed a dominant usage share of the Linux desktop. Then third-party developers would be incentivized to just develop for that distro, which might make the lives of both users and developers better in the long run. And of course, since it's open source, if 'the one true distro' went off the rails eventually, someone else could fork it and become the new 'one true distro', with relatively little danger of vendor lock-in.

nycticorax 7y ago
This blog post provides rebuttals to some of the points made in this comment thread: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a... That blog post was linked to from here: https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issues/7 https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issue...