12 ms·

QBittorrent v4.5.0: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Legible Text

224 points by berkut 4y ago

chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078
- bartvk 4y ago
  I feel really sorry for the developers. If I click on that issue, I get the impression that these don't seem to be moderated in any way, and the result is extensive bikeshedding. The article itself is great though. I use qBittorrent and I run it in dark mode. I'm going to skip this version for now.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    The article doesn't mention how the new toolbar icons are also eyecancer, at least in dark mode. I had to switch to Text only buttons to avoid burning my eyes out from the bright red Remove icon on the dark gray background. So yeah, another reason for you to skip this version.
  - sph 4y ago
    There is bikeshedding and there is developers with no concept of design redesigning UIs. qBittorrent was already quite ugly, but this is just awful: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078#issuecomment-1329331777 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078#issu... — why that bright blue on top of white? If you really want to make it blue, at least retain a decent contrast. And let's not even start with those icons... The shapes could work, albeit they are quite unrefined, but the garish colours do not convey any information nor show any artistic consistency. (cue the "it's open-source, if you don't like it fork it, but dare not criticize us because it's rude" comment) I am fine with people not being good at design, but the worst designers are convinced they are decent enough. It's like that law that eludes me right now, that people bad at something often overestimate their abilities and are blind to their shortcomings.
    - Rexogamer 4y ago
      Dunning-Kruger?
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        Close, but not quite. D-K is the law where someone who's really good at one thing (like writing software) thinks that this means they're super-smart and therefore must be an expert at everything else.
        dankent 4y ago
        I'm afraid that is also not correct. Dunning-Kruger is defined as people with low ability in a domain overestimating their own ability in that domain – it does not require someone to be really good in another domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
        ilyt 4y ago
        I think you're at D-K peak about D-K
      - sph 4y ago
        That's the one.
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      The irony is the fact that the previous theme is fine. The old design won't win any awards, but it does the job.
    - dspillett 4y ago
      > (cue the "it's open-source, if you don't like it fork it, but dare not criticize us because it's rude" comment) “If you don't like it, fork it” (or a little less polite “if you don't like it, feel free to fork off”!) is perfectly valid IMO. The second part should just be “don't criticize rudely”.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    From my experience lurking in that repo, I found the development of Qbittorrent chaotic, and it has been like that for years. They have no moderation in issues (hence 2.6k+ open issues); Commiting frequency is (relatively) low for such a complex program; And it also has lots of odd UX issues that has been solved on uTorrent at least 10 years ago. My pet peeve is that if you have "add .!qd to unfinished torrent files" option enabled, it somehow would prevent you to manually put completed files in and ask QB to re-check, a practice I often do to help seeding with files I already have (if you do so, it either totally ignore it when checking, or delete your completed file!) I can't really tell why (lack of contributors, or just bad management), so I won't point fingers. On the other hand, despite all the quirks and issues, the main functions work solid; and they seem to add/improve core features steadily. So I really have nothing to complain as a user. I just avoid updating to newest version in general.
- ikt 4y ago
  My favourite: Someone made a theme with white colored text to improve text readability with the dark theme. https://datalars.com/2023/01/03/qbittorrent-v450-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-legible-text-2/ https://datalars.com/2023/01/03/qbittorrent-v450-the-hitchhi... The reply: It's all going to be fixed in 4.5.1 anyway.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
> The very bad move in this case, was hard-coding foreground colours, while simultaneously not hard-coding background colours. Oh holy. People act like dark themes, or theming is a relatively recent invention. But in fact, Windows 95 and even earlier were already entirely themeable, system-wide (well themeable is a bit of an exaggeration, you could modify the color scheme, but still...). But the quoted problem is exactly what was already happening back then to basically prevent you from ever deviating from the default colors too much. Sure, you could make the default gray background a little darker or brighter, but I remember I tried doing white text on black background, and after a couple days I encountered enough programs that at least in some places hard-coded black text but used the system default background color. What worked a little better was programs that forced both, some text editor forcing black on white, but that looked pretty jarring too, contrast-wise. Switched back to default colors and never bothered again to this day.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Back in 95 "SE", you could invert the colors on your own. My mom had this need to use a reddish background and black text that was a bit maddening. I would set the black text to white. It worked, for the most part.
  - bestham 4y ago
    I don't think there was a Windows 95 "Second Edition". Are you talking about the theming that was possible with the "Plus! pack" or something related to the OSR2 version of Windows 95?
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      You're right. I'm talking about the Plus pack. I don't google and verify every fact I type (though, I probably should). Edit: I really somehow remember having an "SE" designation next to Windows 95, though. Not sure why. Edit: edit: I might be mixing it up with Windows 98 SE. But the Plus! pack is what I'm most likely remembering.
ComodoHacker 4y ago
This story speaks more of the lack of proper QA than anything else. And more broadly, lack of support for widely used FOSS.
Chinnimini 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tonyg 4y ago
> A normal end user cannot do anything about this without significant effort. This succinctly captures an important truth about computers (and especially mobile phones) over the past thirty years or so. Free software communities just don't, ironically, seem to have really had user empowerment as a core value since around the mid-90s or so.
- seqastian 4y ago
  Everyone could install the beta and help out. Nobody does. Damn those ivory tower developers not listening to the people.
  - birksherty 4y ago
    It's should not be necessary for all to give feedback for basic things and developers who have no idea about design should not change design.
    - guipsp 4y ago
      Great! I'm sure you have made a patch addressing these issues?
      - andrepd 4y ago
        People had and they've been liminarly rejected
        guipsp 4y ago
        Have they? Do you mean this MR (which is open)? https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/18214 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/18214
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arnavion 4y ago
jasonkester 4y ago
I don't have many hard and fast rules in my life, but one that I've learned through painful experience is this: Never Update a BitTorrent Client Version 1 of every bittorrent client is lightweight, fast, and does nothing besides torrent your bits. Version 4 is 400gb, takes 30 seconds to load, shows ads, installs a rootkit phoning home to the NSA and mines bitcoin in the background. This is an inviolate for bittorrent clients. There never has and never will be an exception.
- lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
  One of these days, I'm going to make my own BitTorrent client, then sell it to a shady corporation so the BitTorrent client can fulfill its destiny.
- sph 4y ago
  The malware-ridden version 4 of any torrent client is just the modern variant of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
- zufallsheld 4y ago
  Then there is transmission: https://github.com/transmission/transmission https://github.com/transmission/transmission
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    Us French call that l'exception qui confirme la règle.
    - emsixteen 4y ago
      The English equivalent is the direct translation - 'The exception that proves the rule'.
      - monsieurbanana 4y ago
        In English it's the other way around, there's more exceptions than rules, although it can still be learned through tough thorough thought.
qwerty456127 4y ago
Unfortunatey the world is not ready for dark themes yet. I wish I could usw a dark theme but I find the current state unacceptable. Try using a dark theme and every now and then you will encounter a searchlight-bright white area hurting your eyes and contrasting everything uglyly. Some apps just have some white or almost-white panels alongside dark areas. Many websites only support white theme or require you configure them manually (it should be a single OS-level switch propagated to CSS by a browser). This has to chhange for the dark theme idea to reach general usability. Thehe already has been a time when you could just tweak all your colours and fonrs in the control panel and all the apps and all the websites would follow. But this was long ago. By the way simple light/dark switch is not enough. I also want a low-detail theme to disable all the unnecessary visual noise and soothe my nervous system while the majority probably prefers fancy and shiny bells&whistles designs.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > Unfortunatey the world is not ready for dark themes yet. A weird statement to make given that all the tools are in place; what you're describing is poor implementations. The world is ready, the implementations aren't up to par yet. Personal pet peeve is Reddit, I use an alternative app for it that supports dark/light mode as every app should, but because Reddit is mainly used to post screenshots these days, they're often light themed screenshots. I wish the app(s) would apply a filter that applies a dark filter to screenshots.
  - robinsonb5 4y ago
    There also certain areas of endeavour where a light-on-dark theme isn't appropriate. I remember using the superbly pretty Bryce theme on KDE1 back in the early 2000s - but quickly abandoning it because a lot of what I do is print-oriented. If you're designing for print then the "paper" is going to need to be white, so the UI elements had better have similar mean brightness and contrast levels to the representation of the page you're working on.
    - qwerty456127 4y ago
red_admiral 4y ago
This is an example of a much bigger issue in the FOSS world. In theory, FOSS puts the user in control - don't like one of the software author's choices? Just change it yourself! In practice, this is another example for the long list of cases where it took someone with coding skills several hours to fix what's simply a style choice (what colour should the font be). Worse still, that effort was needed simply to get back to how it used to work by default, and it might need further effort to maintain every time the relevant code in the application is updated. (It's not that this doesn't happen outside the FOSS world as well - see trying to get the title bar of the active window ONLY to take the theme color in Win11, for example - but to the extent that FOSS people claim one of their advantages over commercial software is end-user customizability, I hold them to a higher standard here.)
- j1elo 4y ago
  No, FOSS is not about putting the user in literal _control_, and that concept is misused a lot to look down on the idea. FOSS is about ensuring the user has the right to be in control whenever/however they want. Most users won't, ever, but the right is there, if they wanted and knew how to, and that is what FOSS accomplishes. Comment [1] happens to reply a similar thing. In short, this whole issue with qBittorrent cannot be summarized better than this other comment [2]: developers who have no idea about design should not change design. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244160 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244201
- pessimizer 4y ago
  No part of FOSS involves non-programmers being able to fix the code.
  - ric2b 4y ago
    It does, even Richard Stallman says that FOSS also benefits non-technical users because they can hire someone to make a change/fix to the program. Crowdfunding would probably be the most realistic way of that happening.
mariusmg 4y ago
I'm using the same theme (Breeze) on Windows and i don't have any problem. Wonder what makes this specific to Linux/KDE ? https://i.imgur.com/y4FgQ3P.png https://i.imgur.com/y4FgQ3P.png
- alxlaz 4y ago
  The screenshot in the article is with torrents in seeding state, yours is with a torrent in downloading state. I think the problem is specific to the seeding state.
tomxor 4y ago
I just realised I've gradually replaced all of my GUI apps with terminal based ones... I use rtorrent, and as such cannot possibly have issues with UI colour because I define them "system wide" by setting the ANSI colours, which feels kinda like win95... does this make ANSI the most portable UI? because you do get it on all major platforms. I didn't intentionally do this, but I do prefer terminal apps where they are comfortable and enjoy the consistency, minimalism, brutalism, legibility, scalability and control over colour and font choice.
- green-salt 4y ago
  I've started with this too. I'm at the "just give me the damn data and let me format it" phase.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    > "just give me the damn data and let me format it" That perfectly sums up the feeling
drewg123 4y ago
While we're at it, I'd like to give a shout-out to the UEFI devs who decided that in their shell, certain elements should be dark blue on a black background. That's lead to so much fun over the years when recovering machines.
mort96 4y ago
It seems like this has been an issue with qBittorrent for a while? I'm using qBittorrent 4.4.5, when I switched to the Breeze Dark theme, all the text in the sidebar ended up being dark grey text on a dark grey background. How does this happen? I get it when GTK apps are broken by themes, since GTK doesn't really officially support themes out of the box, and GTK themes are just default stylesheet hacks, not some solid theming API. But Qt has always had good official support for themes, and KDE has always exposed a dark theme in their settings app. Is KDE just not a target platform for qBittorrent?
vlovich123 4y ago
It's a bit out there, but at some point the entire compositor could probably use AI like DALL-E to enforce a consistent theme regardless of how the app styles it. The next generation, the application won't even need to really spend a lot of resources rendering. Just a very low resource sketch + state (e.g. what text is where to make sure that the AI renders it correctly) of what it wants to draw and the AI will automatically render it at the correct resolution, anti aliased, consistent etc. At the limit, this would degrade to an application only ever exposing an RPC-like interface that AIs hook into, some application-specific AI model describing how to represent the state / interact with the RPC, and the local AI will automatically generate the appropriate UI (command-line, TUI, GUI + themeing) as needed (e.g. text or speech input). This would be a game changer to how UIs are built. However, I don't think the more advanced applications here are possible with today's generation of AI. It'll probably need some amount of AGI to problem-solve dynamically on the fly.
- chx 4y ago
  Y'all have completely lost it. ChatGPT is not AGI
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Did I say anything like that? > at some point the entire compositor could probably use AI like DALL-E to enforce a consistent theme regardless of how the app styles it. That seems eminently reasonable using today's technology (maybe with some acceleration). Certainly there's plenty of examples of style transference. > The next generation, the application won't even need to really spend a lot of resources rendering. Just a very low resource sketch + state (e.g. what text is where to make sure that the AI renders it correctly) of what it wants to draw and the AI will automatically render it at the correct resolution, anti aliased, consistent etc. Again, this doesn't seem out of the realm or need AGI since we have existence proofs of being able to take a low-value sketch and integrate it into a consistent theme. See https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/01/02/three-eyed-forehead.html https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/01/02/three-eyed-f... or Invoke's Stable Diffusion canvas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVGDGc6-3o&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVGDGc6-3o&feature=youtu.be. Now sure, maybe applying it to a UI where you need things to be functional or there's things around text may pose challenges. Still, I don't know why this seems crazy, require AGI, nor do I see how ChatGPT applies. I finally describe the most advanced application and literally say: > However, I don't think the more advanced applications here are possible with today's generation of AI. It'll probably need some amount of AGI to problem-solve dynamically on the fly. At what point do I claim that ChatGPT is AGI? In fact, I'm saying literally the opposite - we're nowhere close to AGI. It's possible we don't necessarily even need full AGI even for the most advanced use-case (i.e. automatically generating the UI), but certainly ChatGPT / DALL-E are NOT suitable for that, nor is it clear to me that they're in the right evolutionary ballpark (i.e. maybe you need AI that works totally different).
moloch-hai 4y ago
Anybody with astigmatism should know better than to fool with dark themes anyway.

224 points by berkut 4y ago

chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078

bartvk 4y ago
I feel really sorry for the developers. If I click on that issue, I get the impression that these don't seem to be moderated in any way, and the result is extensive bikeshedding. The article itself is great though. I use qBittorrent and I run it in dark mode. I'm going to skip this version for now.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  The article doesn't mention how the new toolbar icons are also eyecancer, at least in dark mode. I had to switch to Text only buttons to avoid burning my eyes out from the bright red Remove icon on the dark gray background. So yeah, another reason for you to skip this version.
- sph 4y ago
  There is bikeshedding and there is developers with no concept of design redesigning UIs. qBittorrent was already quite ugly, but this is just awful: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078#issuecomment-1329331777 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/18078#issu... — why that bright blue on top of white? If you really want to make it blue, at least retain a decent contrast. And let's not even start with those icons... The shapes could work, albeit they are quite unrefined, but the garish colours do not convey any information nor show any artistic consistency. (cue the "it's open-source, if you don't like it fork it, but dare not criticize us because it's rude" comment) I am fine with people not being good at design, but the worst designers are convinced they are decent enough. It's like that law that eludes me right now, that people bad at something often overestimate their abilities and are blind to their shortcomings.
  - Rexogamer 4y ago
    Dunning-Kruger?
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Close, but not quite. D-K is the law where someone who's really good at one thing (like writing software) thinks that this means they're super-smart and therefore must be an expert at everything else.
      - dankent 4y ago
        I'm afraid that is also not correct. Dunning-Kruger is defined as people with low ability in a domain overestimating their own ability in that domain – it does not require someone to be really good in another domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
      - ilyt 4y ago
        I think you're at D-K peak about D-K
    - sph 4y ago
      That's the one.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    The irony is the fact that the previous theme is fine. The old design won't win any awards, but it does the job.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    > (cue the "it's open-source, if you don't like it fork it, but dare not criticize us because it's rude" comment) “If you don't like it, fork it” (or a little less polite “if you don't like it, feel free to fork off”!) is perfectly valid IMO. The second part should just be “don't criticize rudely”.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  From my experience lurking in that repo, I found the development of Qbittorrent chaotic, and it has been like that for years. They have no moderation in issues (hence 2.6k+ open issues); Commiting frequency is (relatively) low for such a complex program; And it also has lots of odd UX issues that has been solved on uTorrent at least 10 years ago. My pet peeve is that if you have "add .!qd to unfinished torrent files" option enabled, it somehow would prevent you to manually put completed files in and ask QB to re-check, a practice I often do to help seeding with files I already have (if you do so, it either totally ignore it when checking, or delete your completed file!) I can't really tell why (lack of contributors, or just bad management), so I won't point fingers. On the other hand, despite all the quirks and issues, the main functions work solid; and they seem to add/improve core features steadily. So I really have nothing to complain as a user. I just avoid updating to newest version in general.
ikt 4y ago
My favourite: Someone made a theme with white colored text to improve text readability with the dark theme. https://datalars.com/2023/01/03/qbittorrent-v450-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-legible-text-2/ https://datalars.com/2023/01/03/qbittorrent-v450-the-hitchhi... The reply: It's all going to be fixed in 4.5.1 anyway.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

> The very bad move in this case, was hard-coding foreground colours, while simultaneously not hard-coding background colours. Oh holy. People act like dark themes, or theming is a relatively recent invention. But in fact, Windows 95 and even earlier were already entirely themeable, system-wide (well themeable is a bit of an exaggeration, you could modify the color scheme, but still...). But the quoted problem is exactly what was already happening back then to basically prevent you from ever deviating from the default colors too much. Sure, you could make the default gray background a little darker or brighter, but I remember I tried doing white text on black background, and after a couple days I encountered enough programs that at least in some places hard-coded black text but used the system default background color. What worked a little better was programs that forced both, some text editor forcing black on white, but that looked pretty jarring too, contrast-wise. Switched back to default colors and never bothered again to this day.

deafpolygon 4y ago
Back in 95 "SE", you could invert the colors on your own. My mom had this need to use a reddish background and black text that was a bit maddening. I would set the black text to white. It worked, for the most part.
- bestham 4y ago
  I don't think there was a Windows 95 "Second Edition". Are you talking about the theming that was possible with the "Plus! pack" or something related to the OSR2 version of Windows 95?
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    You're right. I'm talking about the Plus pack. I don't google and verify every fact I type (though, I probably should). Edit: I really somehow remember having an "SE" designation next to Windows 95, though. Not sure why. Edit: edit: I might be mixing it up with Windows 98 SE. But the Plus! pack is what I'm most likely remembering.

ComodoHacker 4y ago

This story speaks more of the lack of proper QA than anything else. And more broadly, lack of support for widely used FOSS.

Chinnimini 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tonyg 4y ago

> A normal end user cannot do anything about this without significant effort. This succinctly captures an important truth about computers (and especially mobile phones) over the past thirty years or so. Free software communities just don't, ironically, seem to have really had user empowerment as a core value since around the mid-90s or so.

seqastian 4y ago
Everyone could install the beta and help out. Nobody does. Damn those ivory tower developers not listening to the people.
- birksherty 4y ago
  It's should not be necessary for all to give feedback for basic things and developers who have no idea about design should not change design.
  - guipsp 4y ago
    Great! I'm sure you have made a patch addressing these issues?
    - andrepd 4y ago
      People had and they've been liminarly rejected
      - guipsp 4y ago
        Have they? Do you mean this MR (which is open)? https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/18214 https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/18214
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Arnavion 4y ago

jasonkester 4y ago

I don't have many hard and fast rules in my life, but one that I've learned through painful experience is this: Never Update a BitTorrent Client Version 1 of every bittorrent client is lightweight, fast, and does nothing besides torrent your bits. Version 4 is 400gb, takes 30 seconds to load, shows ads, installs a rootkit phoning home to the NSA and mines bitcoin in the background. This is an inviolate for bittorrent clients. There never has and never will be an exception.

lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
One of these days, I'm going to make my own BitTorrent client, then sell it to a shady corporation so the BitTorrent client can fulfill its destiny.
sph 4y ago
The malware-ridden version 4 of any torrent client is just the modern variant of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
zufallsheld 4y ago
Then there is transmission: https://github.com/transmission/transmission https://github.com/transmission/transmission
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  Us French call that l'exception qui confirme la règle.
  - emsixteen 4y ago
    The English equivalent is the direct translation - 'The exception that proves the rule'.
    - monsieurbanana 4y ago
      In English it's the other way around, there's more exceptions than rules, although it can still be learned through tough thorough thought.

qwerty456127 4y ago

Unfortunatey the world is not ready for dark themes yet. I wish I could usw a dark theme but I find the current state unacceptable. Try using a dark theme and every now and then you will encounter a searchlight-bright white area hurting your eyes and contrasting everything uglyly. Some apps just have some white or almost-white panels alongside dark areas. Many websites only support white theme or require you configure them manually (it should be a single OS-level switch propagated to CSS by a browser). This has to chhange for the dark theme idea to reach general usability. Thehe already has been a time when you could just tweak all your colours and fonrs in the control panel and all the apps and all the websites would follow. But this was long ago. By the way simple light/dark switch is not enough. I also want a low-detail theme to disable all the unnecessary visual noise and soothe my nervous system while the majority probably prefers fancy and shiny bells&whistles designs.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> Unfortunatey the world is not ready for dark themes yet. A weird statement to make given that all the tools are in place; what you're describing is poor implementations. The world is ready, the implementations aren't up to par yet. Personal pet peeve is Reddit, I use an alternative app for it that supports dark/light mode as every app should, but because Reddit is mainly used to post screenshots these days, they're often light themed screenshots. I wish the app(s) would apply a filter that applies a dark filter to screenshots.
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  There also certain areas of endeavour where a light-on-dark theme isn't appropriate. I remember using the superbly pretty Bryce theme on KDE1 back in the early 2000s - but quickly abandoning it because a lot of what I do is print-oriented. If you're designing for print then the "paper" is going to need to be white, so the UI elements had better have similar mean brightness and contrast levels to the representation of the page you're working on.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago

red_admiral 4y ago

This is an example of a much bigger issue in the FOSS world. In theory, FOSS puts the user in control - don't like one of the software author's choices? Just change it yourself! In practice, this is another example for the long list of cases where it took someone with coding skills several hours to fix what's simply a style choice (what colour should the font be). Worse still, that effort was needed simply to get back to how it used to work by default, and it might need further effort to maintain every time the relevant code in the application is updated. (It's not that this doesn't happen outside the FOSS world as well - see trying to get the title bar of the active window ONLY to take the theme color in Win11, for example - but to the extent that FOSS people claim one of their advantages over commercial software is end-user customizability, I hold them to a higher standard here.)

j1elo 4y ago
No, FOSS is not about putting the user in literal _control_, and that concept is misused a lot to look down on the idea. FOSS is about ensuring the user has the right to be in control whenever/however they want. Most users won't, ever, but the right is there, if they wanted and knew how to, and that is what FOSS accomplishes. Comment [1] happens to reply a similar thing. In short, this whole issue with qBittorrent cannot be summarized better than this other comment [2]: developers who have no idea about design should not change design. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244160 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34244201
pessimizer 4y ago
No part of FOSS involves non-programmers being able to fix the code.
- ric2b 4y ago
  It does, even Richard Stallman says that FOSS also benefits non-technical users because they can hire someone to make a change/fix to the program. Crowdfunding would probably be the most realistic way of that happening.

mariusmg 4y ago

I'm using the same theme (Breeze) on Windows and i don't have any problem. Wonder what makes this specific to Linux/KDE ? https://i.imgur.com/y4FgQ3P.png https://i.imgur.com/y4FgQ3P.png

alxlaz 4y ago
The screenshot in the article is with torrents in seeding state, yours is with a torrent in downloading state. I think the problem is specific to the seeding state.

tomxor 4y ago

I just realised I've gradually replaced all of my GUI apps with terminal based ones... I use rtorrent, and as such cannot possibly have issues with UI colour because I define them "system wide" by setting the ANSI colours, which feels kinda like win95... does this make ANSI the most portable UI? because you do get it on all major platforms. I didn't intentionally do this, but I do prefer terminal apps where they are comfortable and enjoy the consistency, minimalism, brutalism, legibility, scalability and control over colour and font choice.

green-salt 4y ago
I've started with this too. I'm at the "just give me the damn data and let me format it" phase.
- tomxor 4y ago
  > "just give me the damn data and let me format it" That perfectly sums up the feeling

drewg123 4y ago

While we're at it, I'd like to give a shout-out to the UEFI devs who decided that in their shell, certain elements should be dark blue on a black background. That's lead to so much fun over the years when recovering machines.

mort96 4y ago

It seems like this has been an issue with qBittorrent for a while? I'm using qBittorrent 4.4.5, when I switched to the Breeze Dark theme, all the text in the sidebar ended up being dark grey text on a dark grey background. How does this happen? I get it when GTK apps are broken by themes, since GTK doesn't really officially support themes out of the box, and GTK themes are just default stylesheet hacks, not some solid theming API. But Qt has always had good official support for themes, and KDE has always exposed a dark theme in their settings app. Is KDE just not a target platform for qBittorrent?

vlovich123 4y ago

It's a bit out there, but at some point the entire compositor could probably use AI like DALL-E to enforce a consistent theme regardless of how the app styles it. The next generation, the application won't even need to really spend a lot of resources rendering. Just a very low resource sketch + state (e.g. what text is where to make sure that the AI renders it correctly) of what it wants to draw and the AI will automatically render it at the correct resolution, anti aliased, consistent etc. At the limit, this would degrade to an application only ever exposing an RPC-like interface that AIs hook into, some application-specific AI model describing how to represent the state / interact with the RPC, and the local AI will automatically generate the appropriate UI (command-line, TUI, GUI + themeing) as needed (e.g. text or speech input). This would be a game changer to how UIs are built. However, I don't think the more advanced applications here are possible with today's generation of AI. It'll probably need some amount of AGI to problem-solve dynamically on the fly.

chx 4y ago
Y'all have completely lost it. ChatGPT is not AGI
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Did I say anything like that? > at some point the entire compositor could probably use AI like DALL-E to enforce a consistent theme regardless of how the app styles it. That seems eminently reasonable using today's technology (maybe with some acceleration). Certainly there's plenty of examples of style transference. > The next generation, the application won't even need to really spend a lot of resources rendering. Just a very low resource sketch + state (e.g. what text is where to make sure that the AI renders it correctly) of what it wants to draw and the AI will automatically render it at the correct resolution, anti aliased, consistent etc. Again, this doesn't seem out of the realm or need AGI since we have existence proofs of being able to take a low-value sketch and integrate it into a consistent theme. See https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/01/02/three-eyed-forehead.html https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/01/02/three-eyed-f... or Invoke's Stable Diffusion canvas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVGDGc6-3o&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwVGDGc6-3o&feature=youtu.be. Now sure, maybe applying it to a UI where you need things to be functional or there's things around text may pose challenges. Still, I don't know why this seems crazy, require AGI, nor do I see how ChatGPT applies. I finally describe the most advanced application and literally say: > However, I don't think the more advanced applications here are possible with today's generation of AI. It'll probably need some amount of AGI to problem-solve dynamically on the fly. At what point do I claim that ChatGPT is AGI? In fact, I'm saying literally the opposite - we're nowhere close to AGI. It's possible we don't necessarily even need full AGI even for the most advanced use-case (i.e. automatically generating the UI), but certainly ChatGPT / DALL-E are NOT suitable for that, nor is it clear to me that they're in the right evolutionary ballpark (i.e. maybe you need AI that works totally different).

moloch-hai 4y ago

Anybody with astigmatism should know better than to fool with dark themes anyway.