Please don’t theme our apps

https://stopthemingmy.app/

by gaius_baltar • 5 years ago

73 80 5 years ago

stopthemingmy.app

runnerup• 5 years ago

Telling me not to change my own icons is truly a bridge too far.

duxup• 5 years ago

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.

a_t482• 5 years ago

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

Jach2• 5 years ago

Yeah I changed my Firefox icon to go away from the POS it became, I'm totally going to blame any Firefox bugs on my icon. This page is ridiculous.

detaro• 5 years ago

If all you are doing is changing your own icons the letter doesn't apply to you, as it clearly states multiple times.

dlgeek• 5 years ago

They explicitly say they're not asking that. At the very top:

This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup.

And further down:

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.

fiddlerwoaroof8• 5 years ago

This is the antithesis of open source and the things that drew me to Linux in the 90s and 00s

dheera2• 5 years ago

Exactly. WTF? If I release an open source app I would LOVE for you to theme it, mod it to your heart's content, and have a party. Send me a pull request if you come up with something cool looking.

eropple2• 5 years ago

This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup.

The objection here is that distributions are building incompatible system themes that break standard GNOME expectations and make applications more confusing for users.

They're not talking about individuals messing with their systems.

emaro• 5 years ago

Of course. If someone themes your app. But if distro xy creates a shiny new look that breaks your app, you probably are not so happy.

fiddlerwoaroof8• 5 years ago

To expand: the web gave us a mindset where developers and designers dictate to everyone else how their app will look. Beforehand, that was up to the OS, the windowing system and/or the user. Now, it’s fair to ask that problems with appearances be reported to the intermediate themers first, but this invasion of the web mindset is profoundly anti-user and anti-community.

Jach2• 5 years ago

It wasn't even really until the modern web that this happened; the browser is called the User Agent because it's acting on behalf of the user, not the website. CSS Zen Garden showed what you could do just by changing CSS. Even today though you can still do what you want to a lot of sites, from adblocking, to restyling with things like Stylus, or full custom JS with Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey. It's the OS apps that are less customizable, but I don't want them to become even less so.

orbital-decay• 5 years ago

Was it, really? When Microsoft implemented arbitrary shapes for windows, Windows apps started to come in all shapes, sizes, and with custom theming engines. Music players were particularly prone to this - not even talking about apps like Sonique, but Microsoft's very own Windows Media Player was like that.

So no, it wasn't web; the dominating desktop OS always lacked the UI consistency.

daguil68367• 5 years ago

Well this is the dumbest thing I've read. If I needed confirmation to stay on Plasma, this is it.

dheera2• 5 years ago

Plasma looked good but it didn't handle suspend very well :( So I had to go back to Cinnamon.

pxc• 5 years ago

Dark Reader for Firefox themed that very website as I read it, teehee

mark38848• 5 years ago

I think these apps still have a long way to go in terms of aesthetics.

rhn_mk1• 5 years ago

apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion

Sources? Win9x and 2000 were perfectly restyleable as far as I know.

This essay comes from the position of "the application developer should not be expected to make the application restyleable", which hangs on the above assertion. If the assertion is false, the argument falls apart, amounting to nothing more than pleading to change the social expectations.

noisy_boy2• 5 years ago

Sure - as long as you provide dark/night mode.

_2paq10• 5 years ago

Ah, the one size fits all approach. I guess the user better find a different app if he doesn't like the default themes. Lots of light and dark themes are sloppy and poorly designed.

Some of them have too high contrast which makes me see after effects of text everywhere on the screen. Some of them have poor contrast and require users to ruin their eyes. But no, let's assume everyone on Earth is fine with a single light and a single dark theme.

noisy_boy2• 5 years ago

Your words not mine - I'm just saying that I'll take an imperfect dark theme compared to the white/bright background that apps usually provide.

thomasahle• 5 years ago

When I used to write apps for Gnome I would always test with all the available style sheets. Why would you test with just one? At least try an inverted (dark) and a low contrast style.

Doxin• 5 years ago

The gtk debugger even has a convenient dropdown to change the theme on-the-fly.

lavabiopsy14• 5 years ago

I think it's been suggested for a while to test with the default themes (Adwaita, Adwaita dark, High Contrast) but everything else is unsupported. I don't see how you could test with every stylesheet available when a search seems to turn up over 1000 of them out there: https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135

asperous• 5 years ago

The article says clearly they are talking about distros that apply system wide themes without checking that all GTK applications still look good and not taking about people tinkering.

Distros do this because it looks good in screenshots and give the system a unique flare, but it gives all these applications a bad image when people try them and they look terrible.

Is the expectation that programs like geary should look at all popular distros and make style sheets to look good in all custom themes? I think they are saying they don't have time. People are stepping on their hard work and giving their apps a bad name.

R0b0t1• 5 years ago

Apps should be designed with the goal of being themeable. Applications need to supply hints and avoid e.g. icons with baked in BG.

notatoad• 5 years ago

apps are designed with many goals, and have to make compromises on where they put their efforts. i'm sure they would all love to have the resources to devote to theming, but it's not realistict to expect apps to prioritize theme support over core functionality.

and even if they were designed to be themeable, that doesn't address many of the other concerns here - designing an app to be themeable doesn't automatically update the documentation with whatever custom themes get applied, or ensure that the icons you've chosen in your theme make sense in the context of the app. "apps should be themeable" seems to be the point of this manifesto - the app developers could just block themeing entirely if they wanted to. they don't want to do that, they seem to just be asking that if a distro wants to apply a theme to an app, then that distro should be the ones doing the QA to make sure the app still functions as intended with the custom theme, and that documentation is still available for users who experience the themed version of the app.

mPReDiToR• 5 years ago

An option here would be to have a new item in the top left menu (by default, your theme may move or even remove this) on the window: Untheme

App looks like crap? Untheme it and file a bug if it still looks like crap.

Icons don't make sense? Untheme. Looks more sensible now?

A one off patch to GTK (other toolkits are available) and this problem has a solution.

anothernewdude• 5 years ago

Honestly wish GNOME would leave well enough alone. The best UI is the one I don't have to maintain a configuration that fixes all their mistakes over the years. And it's complicated too, because they've got multiple places where things need to be configured back to a reasonable interface that doesn't hide controls or shadow common keybindings that have existed for decades.

nine_k2• 5 years ago

I see their point. If they don't want their apps to pick up the system theme, I'd suggest that they provided a choice which theme to use, and bundled a good default theme, or several. For instance, GIMP and Inkscape do this, which I find very nice. GTK makes this easy to do.

Otherwise, I very much prefer when apps pick the system theme; on my desktop, both GTK and Qt apps look more or less the same, and I find this good from both aesthetic and ergonomic points of view.

Valkhyr• 5 years ago

I don't use themes or a very heavily themed distro, so maybe I haven't seen egregious (mis)uses of theming.

That said, I absolutely agree when (if) it comes to theming actually breaking functionality (and the original developer having increased support burden because of it).

But asking distros not to style icons feels a step too far, in particular app icons. I appreciate when a distro tries to achieve visual consistency.

gammalost2• 5 years ago

I don't know why people are against this, it seems reasonable to me. If anyone goes beyond the intended usage (through themes or other modifications) then the developer shouldn't be resposible for supporting it

pizza234• 5 years ago

It's because the GNOME devs (which, I think, includes the GTK ones) have an extremely protective position towards "their" product, which clashes with the open source spirit.

Theming ("branding", as they refer to) is, in a sense, just the core of their marketing campaign.

This is not just ideology - they do try also in practical ways to prevent third party devs from customization.

For a background of how horrible the people involved are, you can start from https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti....

Here's the antisocial answer of one of the GNOME devs:

> mccann replies:
I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I’m sorry that this is the case but it wasn’t GNOME’s fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.

gammalost2• 5 years ago

But this isn't an instance of the GNOME or GTK devs complaining. It's an independent person making applications for the platform. If the GNOME devs are against people doing things with their code then it's a whole different issue to this one.

lavabiopsy14• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why you're saying that's antisocial, it was completely true then and it's still somewhat true now. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own subtle differences, if you want to have a good experience for any one of them you'll have to target that specific desktop and test for it. Placing the blame for this solely on GNOME doesn't make any sense, when each of those groups all have their own product that they're trying to promote.

pratio• 5 years ago

I'll add it to the list of reasons why Linux desktops have a long way to go before becoming mainstream. Brings back memories of jwz. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop...

please be careful clicking this link from HN. He doesn't like the HN crowd very much.

I understand the app developers, if you have to support end users because unexpected changes were made not even by the users themselves, it makes writing applications painful.

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

ruph123• 5 years ago

Which other mainstream operating systems allow to apply global themes?

fiddlerwoaroof8• 5 years ago

Windows, up until at least XP, had deep support for restyling.

But this is beside the point: what drew me to Linux in the first place was that it empowered people to remix all the aspects and encouraged people to share these remixes (or “rices” as they’re called on r/unixporn: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pfue6h/gnome_2_fo... )

errantspark• 5 years ago

What an absolutely wild opinion to hold! Kind of speechless at the hubris, especially in this context.

TheCowboy• 5 years ago

The authors took care to carefully express their intentions, wishes, and argument. I find it disappointing to see many comments like this that want to injure more than discuss.

A conversation about the expectations and burdens that people take on when volunteering their time to develop open source software is beneficial to everyone, and at the very least it is worth understanding their point of view. Maybe some solution results from speaking up. Maybe not, but at least they tried to engage with people before giving up.

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

Why is everyone on the internet so argumentative (ironic i know)?

Just say "Our apps aren't designed to work with themes. Take this into consideration when you distribute or use a distributed theme". Yeah it's more passive. But with the former, you're starting fights with people for no reason. You don't care when users theme your app, you care when they download a themed version and complain to you when it's broken.

And users too, need to stop rudely complaining when a free and open-source app doesn't support some theme. They don't have any obligation to do anything. People being rude to OSS maintainers drives them to leave open-source and avoid features (like themes).

arthurcolle• 5 years ago

I'll do whatever I want whenever I want, thanks for your input though.

_2paq10• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1433088460655452162

I don't know why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment (Cinnamon, Solus, PopOS etc) but at this point, it's pretty clear that GNOME/GTK developers don't care one bit about them. They want to control their apps and their ecosystem and don't want anyone telling them what to do. GNOME/GTK is heading toward Google's open source model of "look but don't touch". Anything that doesn't conform to their way is a "hack".

If Jeremy and others really want to control their own desktop environments and apps and themes, they should start searching for alternatives (Qt?) or build their own. It's a mistake to consider GNOME/GTK as a community project.

SAI_Peregrinus• 5 years ago

Hasn't that always been the trade-off of GNOME over KDE? GNOME is very much the "we know what's right for you" desktop environment for Linux, KDE is the "customize ALL the things" desktop environment.

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

I recently switched from KDE to Upstream GNOME because I was tired of long pending bugs(e.g. Dolphin/Baloo going rogue) while new features keep getting added. I was surprised to find how refined GNOME is, everything just works.

I understood that my misconceptions of GNOME was because of how it was integrated in the distros especially inconsistent theming and this letter states why it is so.

I can confidently recommend upstream GNOME confidently to someone migrating from Windows/macOS to Linux for the first time over other DE due this consistency.

_2paq10• 5 years ago

It would obviously be easier for GNOME to ship an apparently more refined experience when customization possibilities are negligible and basic features are missing.

One can't even change the fonts of GNOME out of the box without first installing Tweak Tool and even then, you can't change the font of GNOME Shell itself. If you dare customize the CSS to change it, you're implementing "hacks". I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to change fonts was removed from GNOME and GTK.

Not to mention that GNOME devs seem to think that volume control slider isn't required in their music app and GNOME file picker still doesn't have thumbnails. So yeah, basic features are missing.

https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

Then again, it's probably a useless debate at this point since everything is subjective. I'm confident that one could come up with a desktop environment with windows turned upside down and inside out with colors changing randomly every second and many people would still like it and call it "polished" and "refined".

nine_k2• 5 years ago

why lots of developers have chosen GNOME/GTK to build their own desktop environment

Because the licensing status of Qt was for a long time somehow murky [1]. By 2000 when it was GPL'd many now-current desktop environments have already been born.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#History_of_Qt

j-james• 5 years ago

There also aren't any Qt bindings for C, to my knowledge.

lavabiopsy14• 5 years ago

Please don't jump to these baseless conclusions based on a misinterpretation of one twitter post. The issue here is with libadwaita, not with GTK, and if you actually read the gitlab issue chain by that person then you will see that progress is being made: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/259

It's a mistake to consider GNOME/GTK as a community project.

You're getting this wrong -- GNOME is very much a community project, but it's one that happens to be heavily driven by designers. Maybe this is unusual for an open source project? The general point with the request is that you can't just try to make a desktop that re-uses some GNOME components while also throwing out everything their designers did, the end result there is that users have a bad time. This is not about making someone conform to anyone's way, this is about distros working with app developers to provide the best possible experience for users. Switching toolkits is not really going to fix anything here, you will run into the same issues with any other toolkit if you try to restyle apps in ways that were unsupported and unintended by the app developer.

_2paq10• 5 years ago

Please don't jump to these baseless conclusions based on a misinterpretation of one twitter post. The issue here is with libadwaita, not with GTK, and if you actually read the gitlab issue chain by that person then you will see that progress is being made: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/259

Please don't dismiss my statements as baseless. The presence of an issue does not imply progress. Jeremy is asking for a theming API or a method to let apps use a different theme besides Adwaita.

Jeremy: I'm curious if you think there is a best way to have GNOME core apps continue to use our own theme.
Clasen: If you ask me, the answer is no. To the best of my understanding, linking to libadwaita is an explicit decision to use the Adwaita theme.

I don't think there's any confusion or baseless assumption on my end.

You're getting this wrong -- GNOME is very much a community project

Doesn't look like a community project to me, not in the least. It's as much a community project as Android (AOSP) is.

This is not about making someone conform to anyone's way, this is about distros working with app developers to provide the best possible experience for users.

And GNOME/GTK devs get to decide what's the best possible experience for the user — removing any customization possibilities for the sake of consistency. If anyone doesn't like that, they can piss off. This is pretty much what "making someone conform to someone's way" looks like.

pavon• 5 years ago

Gnome and GTK are designed with themes as a core feature, and have been for ages. This is like refusing to support application menus (vs window menus) when they became a core part of Gnome. I personally may not use them, but it is part of the system UI guidelines, and if I want my app to integrate with the rest of the system, I need to support it.

Discussing what makes themes difficult to support - how to design themes that don't break good apps, and how to design apps that don't break with good themes - would be far more productive than telling people not to use a core feature of their desktop.

lavabiopsy14• 5 years ago

Gnome and GTK are designed with themes as a core feature, and have been for ages.

I don't know where you heard this, but to my knowledge this hasn't been true. GNOME 3 didn't really support "themes" proper, for a while now the only supported theme is Adwaita. It technically did support re-styling with CSS, and you could load a different CSS using the tweak tool, but this was always considered unsupported -- if you loaded a theme that had bad color contrast or makes the text otherwise unreadable or broke any number of other things that a theme could break, then that was on you. The option was appropriately hidden in the tweak tool so non-technical users wouldn't accidentally load a theme that breaks their desktop in an unrecoverable way.

Discussing what makes themes difficult to support - how to design themes that don't break good apps, and how to design apps that don't break with good themes - would be far more productive

Respectfully, it wouldn't. This has already been discussed quite a bit and the problem is that if you want the full power of CSS theming then the apps will always break, because the theme can literally change anything anywhere. There is no way to design a theme or app that works correctly here, it's like trying to take a random CSS file from one website and then applying it to another random website. Sure maybe it might change some things, but most likely it won't really work because none of the class names will match up. The only way "theming" really can be done reliably is to do it in small controlled ways, e.g. I believe there is some discussion of allowing changes to the accent color similar to what Windows and Mac do.

tempodox• 5 years ago

What an excellent piece of writing. Written communication is darned hard, especially with an audience you don't know. Apparently I'm already so used to bad writing that this letter jumped out to me for the quality of its writing alone. Something like this takes several iterations of work, not just inspiration and good luck. I can only commend the authors for putting it in.

Also,

We believe that a technical solution would likely not be effective, because this is not a technical problem.

That's another manhole we developers tend to fall into. Props for avoiding it.

Needless to say, I do agree with the letter's appeal.

solarkraft• 5 years ago

I absolutely hate this. I want my apps to look and act uniformly. If you want a square you can paint anything into without a regard for the system you’re no better than an Electron dev.

Please don’t theme our apps

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