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In the case of GNOME it is not apathy towards choice but corporate backing.

That's what it looks like to me as well but whenever this is asserted, GNOME folks are quick to point out that they are understaffed and GNOME is a community project. I suppose we'll never know the reality.

Despite being an even larger collection of s/w than GNOME and strongly supported by SuSE

I remember reading on HN that SuSE has people for GNOME developement but no one for KDE development. IIRC, they also ship with GNOME as the default choice.

That shows the power of big corporate money's ability to take over even ostensibly "FOSS" software that's theoretically free but practically still dominated by a few companies

I've mentioned GNOME being similar to Android and Chromium in its nature of "look but don't touch" open source (unless you are part of their "community") but this hasn't been received well.

There is no reasonable argument to make for a Chromium only web from anyone without vested interests.

It could be just apathy towards choice. I've observed this behavior among GNOME advocates as well. Some of them would rather see GNOME as the only de facto choice for a desktop environment on Linux and considering how it's installed by default on most major distributions, those words and their effect aren't far fetched.

All the GTK4 apps I know all exclusive to their specific platforms. Most of them are being made exclusively for GNOME. Some of them have been made exclusively for elementary. I'm not interested if it's technically possible to create DE and WM neutral GTK4 apps. I'm interested if neutral apps are being made, which they aren't, whatever the reasons may be.

I doubt it's a good choice for cross DE and WM apps on Linux, let alone cross platform apps.

It could be any DE, even a newly created one.

Like I said earlier,

but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or *anything really*) as fragmentation.

The idea of "one agreed upon blessed way of doing things" implies that a DE can be made to work for everyone, which is a false assumption. Just because Windows and Mac follow this philosophy, doesn't mean that it's right. Diversity and independence of thought isn't irrelevant fragmentation.

What do those even mean and why should I care?

If you don't like configuration, you shouldn't care. Just pick any popular distro and use whatever's shipped by default.

Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use.

And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. I respect users choice to use GNOME but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or anything really) as fragmentation.

For example, here's one of the parent posts

There is no reason there can’t be one agreed upon blessed way of doing things in Linux while still enabling users like you to have choice.

This is pretty oxymoronic.

just that the defaults should be stronger

Agreed.

GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.

I wasn't joking or being hyperbolic in my previous post. GNOME may have good defaults in certain cases but it ends there. User choice and customization are seen as design defects and anti-features. They really do believe that there is a One True Font and One True Theme out there and anything else is unsupported.

Sane defaults shouldn't come at the cost of user choice. If they do, there's little reason to use Linux over a Mac because the former essentially becomes Android style "look but don't touch" open source.

Yes, let's search for the One True Font, One True Theme, and Unicorns while we're at it. Oh, let's also pretend that we'll give users a choice. Well, technically, we will but we will make it "unsupported" and call it a hack.

Wait, I think that reminds me of a desktop environment.

Good job misleading everyone and painting a rosy picture of India because yay, nationalism.

There is a data cap on broadband. It's called "commercial usage terms" and it defines a data cap of 3.3TB a month often written in size 6 font or omitted. This is when you're using either Airtel or Jio, the two biggest broadband providers in the nation. Quoting prices for 4G internet is pretty much useless because of how unreliable it is.

The prices for calls and internet have started to increase after Jio and Airtel both admitted that the prices in India are unsustainable. Jio also acquired several smaller internet service providers. My apartment complex has only two options — Jio or Airtel.

I have the same problem with some apps and I want you to find a solution but I don't understand what this has to do with GTK.

I didn't say that it was a problem with GTK. I said that it's a problem in the dark version of the Adwaita theme. I disagree with the choice of the background and the foreground color.

Theming is only a band-aid

It's the only solution that comes to mind, unless there's a One True Theme out there that works for everyone.

I suggest at minimum turning the contrast down on your display or permanently enabling night shift mode.

I've already enabled night mode which reduces the gamma of the display. Turning down the contrast of the monitor doesn't sound right because there are low contrast, medium contrast, and high contrast themes out there. Fortunately, there are objective criteria to measure the contrast. When using gedit, for example, with the Adwaita dark theme, I got `#EEEEEC` as the foreground color of text and `#303030` as the background color which gives a contrast ratio of 11.36 according to the WCAG 2.0.

https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/eeeeec-303030

In my anecdotal experience, contrast ratios above 7 or 8 when using dark mode often end up causing halation which makes GTK apps unusable or uncomfortable for me for more than a few minutes.

Of course, some people may not have this problem and they might find these choice of colors as perfectly normal which is exactly why theming and user choice is important but it seems to be heavily de-emphasized in the GNOME world and the focus is on finding "perfect" solutions.

Another option may be to pursue something like a gnome extension

unsupported, generally looked down upon, and called as hacks by the GNOME team, just like GNOME tweak tool and GTK_THEME

No, the current draft allows changing all colors

Does it allow changing the background color of a window and foreground color of the text in a GTK app and would it be officially supported?

This is trying to paint someone as being stubborn here after they already changed their mind

I just pointed it out because as I said, this behaviour is fairly common on the GNOME issue tracker. There are numerous instances but for now, the Inter font issue comes to mind

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2331

GTK_THEME is mainly a setting for developers, you should probably not be using that

Well, this is new information because this blog post

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

and everyone else I've talked to seems to be presenting GTK_THEME as one of the options for changing themes for GTK4 apps, which is absurd user experience, to say the least.

It has all the same issues as the tweak tool where it's unreliable and some apps may not function correctly with some themes or may not respect the setting at all.

Now I'm wondering if this information was intentionally withheld in that blog post.

In almost every case when I've seen people complain about the default theme it's because of fixable bugs in the theme that upstream wants fixed.

What if I disagree with basic choices like the dark mode background color? The contrast between the background and text in dark mode is too high for me and I get halation in my eyes within a few minutes of reading text inside a GTK app with the dark version of the Adwaita theme.

I'm fairly certain that this issue won't be entertained on their issue tracker and even if it was, I'm not sure I want to subject myself to their behaviour as shown in the link above and the font issue in context.

a real theming API

that "real" theming API just changes accent colors and wouldn't solve my issue

Do you expect GTK to try to please everyone by merging all the widgets from libadwaita and libgranite and deprecating those libraries?

If there are no feasible alternatives to develop GTK4 only apps besides creating your own widgets from scratch, the practical outcome would be that most independent developers would end up choosing libadwaita not because they want their apps to be GNOME apps but because it would be relatively harder to not use libadwaita. This can be seen in this comment from the developer of GTKeddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/pg7gkr/introducing_g...

or bad text rendering on non-hidpi displays suck, but both have people working on fixing them.

It wasn't even acknowledged as a bug in the beginning, even after screenshots with clear signs of regression were posted. Matthias Clasen closed the bug report saying it wasn't a bug but an intended feature. There's really no appropriate words to describe such behaviour, which is fairly common on the GNOME issue tracker, besides calling it "wilfully dense" or "trollish".

As for themes, I quite like the new libadwaita theme, and prefer it to the default GTK theme. You're free to disagree, but you can't say your opinion is correct, nor can I.

Sure, but in that case, an officially supported method to change the theme should be provided in case I don't agree with your choice. Apparently, GNOME tweak tool was never supported, is not supported, and will never be supported. For now, GTK_THEME is being presented as an alternative but do you expect me to close all of my programs and relogin to my session to change my theme? Should I create wrapper shell scripts for all of my GTK apps?

Keep in mind that libadwaita is an optional library _specifically for gnome apps_. If you don't like gnome, don't use libadwaita.

The fact that there are no non-trivial GTK4 apps out there that don't use libadwaita or libgranite tells me what I need to know. Even LibreOffice uses libadwaita now. Is LibreOffice a GNOME app?

As a KDE user i have to download hundreds of MBs of dependencies just to use one GNOME app

which is why I later clarified that I think that development of apps like qBittorrent is mostly dead. They work well across all desktop environments and window managers without needing hundreds of dependencies. Everyone apparently decided to fragment the already niche desktop landscape on Linux.

...Changing the default fonts is definitely supported.

Not for the GNOME shell, unless you're editing the relevant CSS files in /usr/share/themes or installing themes that do so. And if you do end up doing that, you get to see issues like this

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2331

And I wouldn't be surprised if changing fonts became an unsupported feature in future releases because apparently, it was just a hack and not well supported and didn't really work like themes. Apparently, gnome-tweak-tool is an unsupported tool as well.

Qt says hi.

Yeah, Qt feels better to use compared to GTK but with bugs like these

https://bugreports.qt.io/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/QTBUG-...

and having to pull in hundreds of MBs of dependencies to use just one KDE app, say Gwenview, I'd say that platform agnostic GUI apps are either dead or rare. qBittorrent is a good example of such a rare app that works really well across desktop environments and window managers on Linux.

Libadwaita is the library you use when you're targetting GNOME.

If you want to target something other than GNOME, you don't want to use libadwaita.

Does GTK4 provide any viable model of development if one doesn't want to target GNOME or elementary? I, for one, haven't seen a non-trivial GTK4 app that doesn't use libadwaita or libgranite and the more I discuss this online, the more I suspect that this is intended but unspoken behavior.

Even LibreOffice has now decided to use libadwaita. Does that mean LibreOffice's GTK version is only intended for GNOME? If yes, GTK4 is basically a toolkit for GNOME masquerading as a general purpose toolkit.

Is that high contrast mode, their dark mode colors, and their font choice supposed to work for everyone?

This is the most misleading part of the entire text on that website, almost as if it was written by a skilled poltician who knows how to lie on your face.

They say that they're not against tinkerers but that's exactly what they've done with libadwaita and libgranite.

With the advent of libadwaita, GTK really is GNOME toolkit. Most advocates are really deceptive when they talk about this and say GTK4 is agnostic to platforms but I haven't come across a single non-trivial GTK4 app that isn't based on libadwaita. Even LibreOffice is becoming a libadwaita app.

The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. I'm trying to switch to CLI and TUI apps for all of my tasks. If they don't exist, I'll try to create them.

Ah yes, the "every preference has a cost" philosophy which leads people into deciding things like that everyone on Earth is ok with a One True Colorscheme (Adwaita) and a One True Font (Cantarell). People who suffer from halation due to the contrast of the dark version of Adwaita and people who like fonts besides Cantarell don't exist.

Of the top of my head, people who are working on Android UX and the GNOME desktop environment.

Enjoy using a music player which doesn't have volume control and a file picker which doesn't have thumbnails. I guess you feel that you don't need those features because "tinkering is just a pain in the ass now".

Unfortunately, spectacle doesn't work on Sway, at least it didn't the last time I tried it a few months ago.

Their own screenshot tool does not adhere to the same workflow, so maybe they are blind to the issue.

Which isn't surprising, in the least. I agree with aidenn0, if you're using a custom screenshot tool, you're not using GNOME as it's intended to be used.

Here's another fun fact, their music player doesn't have a volume control and that's how they think end users should use it.

Linux has never been about choice. There was choice because no two people could agree on a set of protocols and standards. And slowly we're converging on a small set of decent (not perfect!) ideas volunteers can focus their efforts on. I honestly hope the choice meme dies because it is so toxic.

So everyone who uses or develops alternative init systems like runit and openrc and alternative DEs like KDE and package managers like apk and pacman should just stop and work on and use systemd, GNOME, and flatpak instead because that is the One True Way of using Linux on desktop?

Quite a power trip attitude I'd say. I can't imagine why I would use Linux if choices I don't agree with were shoved down my throat.

Yes, you should also remember that when using third-party KDE themes like qt5ct, or hidden KDE settings

I don't have much skin in the game to be honest because I've given up on using any GUI apps on Linux wherever possible. If I do use GUI apps, I keep looking for ways to quit using them too. The attitude exhibited by GTK and GNOME developers on their issue trackers and the unstable nature of KDE apps on Wayland has made me cynical about GUI on Linux.

I wouldn't know how to differentiate between "supported" and "unsupported" features on GNOME. If basic features like changing keyboard shortcuts are "unsupported" on GNOME, I'm not sure who the target audience of such a DE is, except maybe grandmas, managers, and people with attention deficit issues. Then again, I fail to see why such people would bother with using Linux in the first place.

And yeah, I would use KDE apps but they're almost unusable on swaywm on Wayland so I've stopped using them as well.

I'll focus on creating and using only command line tools and TUIs. Unlike the GUI mess that we have, they are mostly platform independent and can be used almost anywhere.

It was nice talking to you. Thanks for your time.

Interesting, I'll remember this the next time someone tells me to just use GNOME Tweak Tool to use Emacs keybindings or change the theme or keyboard shortcuts because they're unsupported features and maybe disabled anytime without notice, despite the apparent impression most people seem to be under when they use GNOME Tweak Tool.

there isn't a reality where this does whatever you want

I wish something called user choice and configuration options existed in this reality.

The tweak tool method was also an unsupported third-party thing with most of the same limitations.

Interesting, so what was and is the supported first party method to change themes and set keyboard shortcuts and use Emacs keybindings and make the Caps Lock key behave as Esc on GNOME?

It can be forked, it can be changed, your freedoms are enforced.

Sure, let's pretend that every user is a programmer who knows what a hard fork is and, even if he is a programmer, he's willing to create hard forks of each and every GNOME software he uses to support features that worked before and don't work now. This has worked out great for PopOS and Budgie right?

It's so much easier to just fall back on the open source argument and ignore the fact that it means nothing for the average user who doesn't know the first thing about C code or git to be able to make the changes he wants to.