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That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to

That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to work with an endlessly growing matrix of user customizations. At some point people have to decide if they are going to prioritize on working on new features, or if they want to prioritize allowing people to change the colors and the fonts in ways that could potentially cause bad breakage. Your stance on the subject might be different from others. Since it's all open source, you can of course patch it and modify it all you want to match your priorities, and the developers have no problem with you doing that (and may even encourage it sometimes). >https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3409 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3409 I'm confused why this was posted or why it makes you think that? Apps don't need to match the theme exactly to work, I use some KDE apps with the default theme and they work fine. >Yeah, I know. It's pointless to have discussions, especially when the project in question isn't a community project and follows the "look but don't touch" open source model of development. If you want to discuss technical issues to solve that, I'd love to, but I am not interested in engaging you further when you make these type of false and inflammatory statements. Your time is worth a lot more than this, please don't spend it doing these things. My point is that the technical issues have already been discussed repeatedly at length, unless you are actively working on implementing this then it seems extremely unlikely that either of us will have anything new to add. So yes, in that sense it is pointless to have discussions, but it's for the opposite reason that you're saying: the community has already had these discussions and done all the "touching" that needed to be done.

ayushnix 5y ago
> That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to work with an endlessly growing matrix of user customizations. It's genuinely sad to see that changing fonts is now considered a hack and unsupported behavior on Linux. I'm not into extreme customization or anything of that sort. I don't have any user themes installed besides Adwaita or any icon themes besides Breeze and Adwaita on my Linux desktop running the Sway window manager. But one of the things that I really like is not being forced to use ugly fonts like DejaVu or Segoe. It really is sad to know that soon, some apps on my system will not use the fonts I want them to. You've asked me not to be cynical but these issues are what drive me to cynicism. I'm not a particular fan of using Linux but I still use it because I'm more uncomfortable with Windows and Mac. But if there's no difference between how they work and how my Linux desktop works, what's even the point? You can't expect users to maintain hard forks or patch and compile stuff. Thanks for your time though.
- lavabiopsy 5y ago
  This is not new, GNOME has hidden the font settings as an undocumented setting in the tweak tool for quite some time now. I don't think you should have to be disappointed that it's considered an unsupported hack, if it works for you, that's great, keep on doing it. All "unsupported" means is that the developers don't test with that setup... and how could they? They can't possibly test with every font there is, so marking it unsupported is really only an acknowledgement of the way it already was before. If an app developer says don't theme my app, that's likely because it has a high probability of breaking the app. That's what the letter is talking about and gives examples for. And yes, font changes can break apps. Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it. Also I don't think the internal setting is ever going to get removed from GTK because that it what the themes themselves use to set the font, even if libraries like libadwaita and libgranite want to enforce a certain system theme and font setting, the user still is the one that gets to override the theme.
  - ayushnix 5y ago
    > Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it. What do you think will happen when developers who've built their apps using GTK3 start migrating their apps to GTK4? They'll most likely pick libadwaita like the developer of GTkeddit did. He wasn't aware about how libadwaita is going to enforce its own theme and was surprised when I told him about it. Now, I know I'll never use his app because it's using libadwaita but what if apps like Firefox start using GTK4 with libadwaita? What do I do then? Switch to Chromium? It uses GTK as well. The so-called choice that open source offers is merely an illusion in some cases. The choices that GNOME devs make end up hurting users like me who want nothing do with GNOME and who aren't even using GNOME.

ayushnix 5y ago

> That has basically already happened on Windows and Mac and for good reason, so it's actually long overdue to happen on Linux. Apps simply cannot be expected to work with an endlessly growing matrix of user customizations. It's genuinely sad to see that changing fonts is now considered a hack and unsupported behavior on Linux. I'm not into extreme customization or anything of that sort. I don't have any user themes installed besides Adwaita or any icon themes besides Breeze and Adwaita on my Linux desktop running the Sway window manager. But one of the things that I really like is not being forced to use ugly fonts like DejaVu or Segoe. It really is sad to know that soon, some apps on my system will not use the fonts I want them to. You've asked me not to be cynical but these issues are what drive me to cynicism. I'm not a particular fan of using Linux but I still use it because I'm more uncomfortable with Windows and Mac. But if there's no difference between how they work and how my Linux desktop works, what's even the point? You can't expect users to maintain hard forks or patch and compile stuff. Thanks for your time though.

lavabiopsy 5y ago
This is not new, GNOME has hidden the font settings as an undocumented setting in the tweak tool for quite some time now. I don't think you should have to be disappointed that it's considered an unsupported hack, if it works for you, that's great, keep on doing it. All "unsupported" means is that the developers don't test with that setup... and how could they? They can't possibly test with every font there is, so marking it unsupported is really only an acknowledgement of the way it already was before. If an app developer says don't theme my app, that's likely because it has a high probability of breaking the app. That's what the letter is talking about and gives examples for. And yes, font changes can break apps. Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it. Also I don't think the internal setting is ever going to get removed from GTK because that it what the themes themselves use to set the font, even if libraries like libadwaita and libgranite want to enforce a certain system theme and font setting, the user still is the one that gets to override the theme.
- ayushnix 5y ago
  > Also, forgive me if I'm wrong about this but the entire point of Linux and open source seems to be that you can do whatever you want with it, the users don't usually need to end up patching the apps because some other distro will do it (and many of them already seem to), so usually you can find someone else who wants to support it. What do you think will happen when developers who've built their apps using GTK3 start migrating their apps to GTK4? They'll most likely pick libadwaita like the developer of GTkeddit did. He wasn't aware about how libadwaita is going to enforce its own theme and was surprised when I told him about it. Now, I know I'll never use his app because it's using libadwaita but what if apps like Firefox start using GTK4 with libadwaita? What do I do then? Switch to Chromium? It uses GTK as well. The so-called choice that open source offers is merely an illusion in some cases. The choices that GNOME devs make end up hurting users like me who want nothing do with GNOME and who aren't even using GNOME.