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GNOME and KDE are the most complete implementations, yes, but that's just a function of developer time. Keep in mind that's better than what we had with X - whi

GNOME and KDE are the most complete implementations, yes, but that's just a function of developer time. Keep in mind that's better than what we had with X - which had 1 implementation, that couldn't be touched with a ten foot pole because of how fragile said implementation was. > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. We can get consistently themed apps... if everyone hops on Qt. Which they won't because C++ is evil. People want to shove HTML and CSS into their music player and theme it like they do a website, so here we are. This isn't a solved problem on any platform, even really really locked down ones like iOS. Half my iOS apps are web views which don't follow the look and feel of iOS and have inconsistent behavior as compared to the system. And iOS is the best about this honestly - it's, like, way worse on Windows which has half a dozen competing toolkits from Microsoft alone.

bmacho 1y ago
> > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? > The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. OTOH most toolkits are themeable on global and application level. It is certainly possible for a working group to provide consistent themes for applications. E.g. my favorite theme is Adwaita dark[0] from ~Ubuntu 14, and it is possible to tell gtk/qt/tk/fltk/.. to look like this on a global level, and if some applications look bad due to icons or something, then fix them. It's just nobody is doing that. And I agree, I don't see how could've been this a killer application for Wayland, this should be accomplished with distributing config files, and not somewhere near the display protocol. [0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2
- const_cast 1y ago
  The landscape was quite different in 2014. I know, I was there, and Linux desktops have been getting less themable since because application technologies are going off the rails. KDE today is still fairly themable if you stick to Qt apps and GTK 3 apps. But if you use a dozen frameworks then yeah, that's not themable anymore. Which really sucks but it is what it is. And, honestly, it's not that bad. It's much, much worse on some other platforms.

bmacho 1y ago

> > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? > The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. OTOH most toolkits are themeable on global and application level. It is certainly possible for a working group to provide consistent themes for applications. E.g. my favorite theme is Adwaita dark[0] from ~Ubuntu 14, and it is possible to tell gtk/qt/tk/fltk/.. to look like this on a global level, and if some applications look bad due to icons or something, then fix them. It's just nobody is doing that. And I agree, I don't see how could've been this a killer application for Wayland, this should be accomplished with distributing config files, and not somewhere near the display protocol. [0] : https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+adwaita+dark&udm=2

const_cast 1y ago
The landscape was quite different in 2014. I know, I was there, and Linux desktops have been getting less themable since because application technologies are going off the rails. KDE today is still fairly themable if you stick to Qt apps and GTK 3 apps. But if you use a dozen frameworks then yeah, that's not themable anymore. Which really sucks but it is what it is. And, honestly, it's not that bad. It's much, much worse on some other platforms.