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libadwaita used to be purely about supporting "responsive" applications that would seamlessly switch to a more compact layout when displayed in a smaller window

libadwaita used to be purely about supporting "responsive" applications that would seamlessly switch to a more compact layout when displayed in a smaller window/screen size. There's nothing about this that is 'GNOME design language' specific, so why should other desktop environments work on a different 'design language' library? That's just a pointless duplication of effort. If the GNOME folks want to better support separate design languages, they should start out by reintroducing proper theming support to libadwaita. Right now you can only switch to a different theme by manually overwriting the "adwaita" theme configuration, which is a huge regression compared to what GTK+3 supported.

tristan957 2y ago
You are thinking of libhandy, which had similar goals but not the same, hence why libadwaita is not named libhandy.
crashdancer 2y ago
>why should other desktop environments work on a different 'design language' library? The responsive widgets are only a small part of libadwaita. Part of the reason those widgets are still there is because they're still being iterated on -- once a widget gets into GTK it has to be maintained for a long time and GTK developers got burned before by adding a lot of random widgets without iterating first. So the bar is understandably a lot higher for adding new GTK widgets than it is for adding widgets into one of these "design language" libraries. I could see some responsive widgets getting merged into GTK but only if they become stable enough and everybody (not just GNOME) likes the API wants them in GTK. >reintroducing proper theming support to libadwaita It does have proper theming support if you're using it as an app developer. If you mean allowing users to add arbitrary themes to arbitrary applications, that isn't going to happen. It can't be done without breaking applications, and arbitrary theming ruins the whole purpose of it anyway which is to enable all GNOME apps to have a consistent UX and theme.

tristan957 2y ago

You are thinking of libhandy, which had similar goals but not the same, hence why libadwaita is not named libhandy.

crashdancer 2y ago

>why should other desktop environments work on a different 'design language' library? The responsive widgets are only a small part of libadwaita. Part of the reason those widgets are still there is because they're still being iterated on -- once a widget gets into GTK it has to be maintained for a long time and GTK developers got burned before by adding a lot of random widgets without iterating first. So the bar is understandably a lot higher for adding new GTK widgets than it is for adding widgets into one of these "design language" libraries. I could see some responsive widgets getting merged into GTK but only if they become stable enough and everybody (not just GNOME) likes the API wants them in GTK. >reintroducing proper theming support to libadwaita It does have proper theming support if you're using it as an app developer. If you mean allowing users to add arbitrary themes to arbitrary applications, that isn't going to happen. It can't be done without breaking applications, and arbitrary theming ruins the whole purpose of it anyway which is to enable all GNOME apps to have a consistent UX and theme.