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Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

kitsunesoba 5y ago
You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.
- Andrex 5y ago
  Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.
    - pinephoneguy 5y ago
      Or putting the scroll bar back, or getting rid of the awful client side decorations.
rvense 5y ago
I switched from Mac to Linux (in 2008-2009) because I could understand it and make it my own, among other things with theming.
guelo 5y ago
I do say that. The light-grey on top of light-grey theme means a lot of times the only way to tell which is the foreground window is by looking for the 3 colored dots.
rightbyte 5y ago
I'm quite sure you could change system colors willy nilly in OS 8. It was great fun. I miss that part - the feeling of having "your own" system. Since customization where pretty standard back then, it feels like product managers pushing their "vision" rather than technical difficulties preventing that nowadays.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Kaleidoscope and later on Appearance Manager in Classic Mac OS were so much fun. No OS theming system I’ve encountered since have been as capable as those were.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Ye I wonder what fantastic APIs were actually exposed. I remember some 3rd party screen saver I had. Where like Goofy peeked out of folders and Donald Duck was cleaning up some file mess. I mean, how could you even program that? I think it was on the real desktop, not some bitmap, but not too sure.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
I want customizable color schemes and fonts and sizes. It's nice as a user to pick full-on custom themes. Sadly even though Qt is based around theming, I had to turn off theming for semi-customized controls (colored sliders) to make them render correctly on Windows and Linux Breeze/Fusion. And it's more work to verify my app looks good across OSes when QButtonBar and QFormLayout change appearance on different OSes. So finding a good solution is nontrivial.
nine_k 5y ago
If not for scrollbars color, I certainly dislike the macOS GUI for its straightjacket approach. (Also, poor window management.) I wish Gnome folks did not keep on copying it more and more. I see why it's easier to do, but KDE somehow manages. (And if one thinks that Apple UX design can't go wrong, remember Macbooks from a couple of years ago.)
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I get what you’re saying but I find GNOME more evocative of iPadOS than macOS. It’s almost exactly what you would get if you tried to create a desktop environment using an iPad as a starting point. macOS still has several traditional desktop affordances that are eschewed by GNOME, like full menus (not just hamburger junk drawer menus) and customizable toolbars.
selfhoster11 5y ago
This attitude is why we can no longer have stuff that doesn't only come in "light theme" or "dark theme". I consider this a regression. Let me theme my damn computer the way I want. It's called a Personal computer for a reason.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It is silly that dark mode isn't regarded the same as just switching themes. Forcing its adoption however breaks dependency on non-themable components so its popularity is still a net benefit.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    There's a difference between "we'll test and support two color schemes" and "we'll design ui with parametrised colors, shapes and text sizes which can adjust to any change and still be usable". If we settle on bright/dark/colorblind mode selectors that everyone expects to be supported, I'm happy. I've seen themes in the past and there was always a few apps which just can't resize elements in the expected way, or the backgrounds don't tile correctly, or ...
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Ok, then don't support it. But don't patronise me. Don't tell me I couldn't possibly wield the power of recolouring a piece of UI without hurting myself, and deny me the chance to even try.
      - floatboth 5y ago
        No one can deny you anything with FOSS. Go ahead, edit everything, just please don't complain to the developers that something broke because of that.
      - teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
        But libadwaita hasn't taken away the ability to try? You can still load custom themes through GTK_THEME and specific CSS through ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css.
curt15 5y ago
MacOS at least lets users choose the accent color: https://osxdaily.com/2020/07/24/change-accent-color-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2020/07/24/change-accent-color-mac/

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

kitsunesoba 5y ago

You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.

Andrex 5y ago
Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.
  - pinephoneguy 5y ago
    Or putting the scroll bar back, or getting rid of the awful client side decorations.

rvense 5y ago

I switched from Mac to Linux (in 2008-2009) because I could understand it and make it my own, among other things with theming.

guelo 5y ago

I do say that. The light-grey on top of light-grey theme means a lot of times the only way to tell which is the foreground window is by looking for the 3 colored dots.

rightbyte 5y ago

I'm quite sure you could change system colors willy nilly in OS 8. It was great fun. I miss that part - the feeling of having "your own" system. Since customization where pretty standard back then, it feels like product managers pushing their "vision" rather than technical difficulties preventing that nowadays.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
Kaleidoscope and later on Appearance Manager in Classic Mac OS were so much fun. No OS theming system I’ve encountered since have been as capable as those were.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Ye I wonder what fantastic APIs were actually exposed. I remember some 3rd party screen saver I had. Where like Goofy peeked out of folders and Donald Duck was cleaning up some file mess. I mean, how could you even program that? I think it was on the real desktop, not some bitmap, but not too sure.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

I want customizable color schemes and fonts and sizes. It's nice as a user to pick full-on custom themes. Sadly even though Qt is based around theming, I had to turn off theming for semi-customized controls (colored sliders) to make them render correctly on Windows and Linux Breeze/Fusion. And it's more work to verify my app looks good across OSes when QButtonBar and QFormLayout change appearance on different OSes. So finding a good solution is nontrivial.

nine_k 5y ago

If not for scrollbars color, I certainly dislike the macOS GUI for its straightjacket approach. (Also, poor window management.) I wish Gnome folks did not keep on copying it more and more. I see why it's easier to do, but KDE somehow manages. (And if one thinks that Apple UX design can't go wrong, remember Macbooks from a couple of years ago.)

kitsunesoba 5y ago
I get what you’re saying but I find GNOME more evocative of iPadOS than macOS. It’s almost exactly what you would get if you tried to create a desktop environment using an iPad as a starting point. macOS still has several traditional desktop affordances that are eschewed by GNOME, like full menus (not just hamburger junk drawer menus) and customizable toolbars.

selfhoster11 5y ago

This attitude is why we can no longer have stuff that doesn't only come in "light theme" or "dark theme". I consider this a regression. Let me theme my damn computer the way I want. It's called a Personal computer for a reason.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
It is silly that dark mode isn't regarded the same as just switching themes. Forcing its adoption however breaks dependency on non-themable components so its popularity is still a net benefit.
- viraptor 5y ago
  There's a difference between "we'll test and support two color schemes" and "we'll design ui with parametrised colors, shapes and text sizes which can adjust to any change and still be usable". If we settle on bright/dark/colorblind mode selectors that everyone expects to be supported, I'm happy. I've seen themes in the past and there was always a few apps which just can't resize elements in the expected way, or the backgrounds don't tile correctly, or ...
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Ok, then don't support it. But don't patronise me. Don't tell me I couldn't possibly wield the power of recolouring a piece of UI without hurting myself, and deny me the chance to even try.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      No one can deny you anything with FOSS. Go ahead, edit everything, just please don't complain to the developers that something broke because of that.
    - teddyfrozevelt 5y ago
      But libadwaita hasn't taken away the ability to try? You can still load custom themes through GTK_THEME and specific CSS through ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css.

curt15 5y ago

MacOS at least lets users choose the accent color: https://osxdaily.com/2020/07/24/change-accent-color-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2020/07/24/change-accent-color-mac/