We are developers and designers making apps for the GNOME platform. We take pride in our craft and work hard to make sure our applications are a great experience for people.
Unfortunately, all our efforts designing, developing, and testing our apps are made futile by theming in many cases.
This is insanity – even if they claim it only applies to distribution makers. Their argument basically comes down to certain themes making certain applications look bad, and that theming removes branding from applications. First, theming making applications look bad is either an issue with the theme that needs to be fixed or an issue with Gtk+/GNOME being bad at theming, and second, your branding is irrelevant on my computer, or on my distribution.
I use KDE, and one of the main reasons I do so is to ensure I can make my desktop and its applications look exactly the way I want them to look.
> First, theming making applications look bad is either an issue with the theme that needs to be fixed or an issue with Gtk+/GNOME being bad at theming, and second, your branding is irrelevant on my computer, or on my distribution.
Maybe dial back the righteous indignation a couple clicks until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes and written an app or two and had to field end-user complaints that you can’t do anything about.
I have and I agree with Thom.
Just because something isn’t your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your problem.
I sympathize with the developers, even though that path leads to incoherent desktops. Incoherence is one of the charms of X-Windows, IMO. None of this boring uniformity that you get with modern platforms. I gave up fiddling with style overrides back when I stopped using twm, lo these twenty (thirty?) years ago. Who has the time?
kudos to these devs… people blame on the application and problems are theme-related 90% of the time, application developers can’t do anything about them
They could write better themable application or stop f#¤%#¤g depending on specific metrics in the theme to work right.
I have to agree with this.
As it reads to me between the lines, programmers who make use of coding shortcuts are complaining that changing themes wreck their application.
Am I wrong?
I suppose ultimately the distro end users choose will determine if your app is useful or beautiful. If your App isn’t beautiful or useful in a certain distro people won’t use it, that’s a matter for you not the distro!
“one of the main reasons I do so is to ensure I can make my desktop and its applications look exactly the way I want them to look”
There are some cases where a little customisation or theming helps because of the activities that you carry out regularly.
But on the whole, I try to stick with standard look and feel, for various reasons:
1) There is generally a reason why it has been designed that way.
2) It will likely be the most commonly used configuration, and the most tested.
3) Any updates to the software are less likely to run into trouble.
4) It usually makes things easier when you borrow somebody else’s computer / help someone else out with a problem / upgrade your hardware / etc.
As I said, there can be times when a little customisation helps, and in the case of Android phones, installing a launcher from the Play store can help provide a consistent environment when every new phone you buy might come from different manufacturers, with modifications to the base software. We all know there are plenty of Android phones that ship with terrible custom launchers.
I completely agree with the Gnome devs – distributions shouldn’t make pointless changes to the applications they ship (fixing issues and making that available upstream excluded). I especially wish phone manufacturers would cut back on the modifications they make to Android.
And I personally limit what I customise myself, because I think it often creates problems for yourself in the long run. But the problems that you make for yourself are your responsibility.
I agre they should not make pointless changes alike making gkt3 text based only and not allow images in themes. You could make gtk2 look gorgeous, gtk3 looks like shit, and gtk4 is probablt just a blank white box where they have removed everything but a single button that you can not even see since the developer of that app did not want you to see it.
Android Launchers can be themeable, but they themselves are not themes. They are more like choosing cinnamon rather than gnome. same underlying tech, just different ui.
I do this all the time, I’ll theme or hack (add in features) any app that I find to be under-performing or lacking in a certain feature that I require to get work done. Gimp was a big one for me, as before version 2.xx.xx, the only way you could get HiDPI support was by using a custom theme. As far as Gnome apps are concerned, well, I simply don’t use them but if I did, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to modify them if the necessity arose.
The point is, if you don’t want people messing around with your code, lock it and than release it under a different license. Opensource, except for taking someone else’s code/program and than re-branding it as your own, well, anything goes as far as I’m concerned, especially modifying the code to fit your particular workflow, it’s simply the nature of the beast.
Sorry, but this is the primary benefit of open source. Why share the code if you don’t want people to change it for their own needs?
I want my apps to “fit” with the OS/Distro I’m running. To achieve that, it means themes. Take that away and the OS becomes a horrible hodgepodge of ugly apps.
From the top of the article: “This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup.”
But that is the point. They should have a theme api that works. GNOME team is a bunch of people that think you should use your computer in the way that THEY do.
I mean fgs even microsoft allowed theming )better throught third party though) up until windows 7. Now it is all flat an shitty with the same gnome mentality.
Probably Microsoft did that for exactly the same reasons 😉
B… b… but if are forced to respect themes, how can I make my app look like a bastard knock-off of some Mac OS X application (see the Songbird app for a representative example) or a make my app look like a Fisher Price toybox?
~every GNOME developer out there
Also, there is the question of why the theming engine is breaking apps (epecially considering the Windows theming engine didn’t break any apps that have been released after it was introduced in 2001). But if I touch on this issue the whole comment section will devolve into yet another discussion about the code quality in the Linux Desktop stack (or lack thereof), so I won’t.
Well, most windows applications ignore the themes these days. Theming is seen as “obsolete” by modern designers who want everybody to suffer their terrible choices.
@Dear devs:
Sorry guys! Not gonna happen.
This is Linux! 🙂
“Maybe dial back the righteous indignation a couple clicks until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes and written an app or two and had to field end-user complaints that you can’t do anything about.”
Has it occurred to you that that the problem *IS* the so-called “Branding”?
This is going to be controversial.
Their complaints are valid. I’ve seen some distributions that apparently hate the default theme so much they release janky broken themes. The branding thing is just about changing their icon in the theme to something unrecognizable.
Myself? I tend to switch the theme back to the standard Gnome theme because the other themes look ugly to me. Though they changed the theme with the last version of Gnome, so now I think it’s uglier…
All gtk3 themes are flat and ugly, perhaps that is the reason. If you could get something like SlickneSS by TheROB (gtk2) i might look into gnome again.
I’m not an expert on UI design but would like to raise some points, anyway:
– Color sensitivity and preference have a wide variance. If you fail to acknowledge that and prepare your apps to respect changes wanted by users, well, you failed. This is absolutely the minimum your app should honor and a good HIG should be detailed in depth about it;
– Likewise, but not as critical, elements proportions preferences have also a wide variance. Get smart and let people set some properties to adjust them. Extra points if you do that. Of course, support must be present on toolkits;
– Even though I, in principle, agree that app icons should not be messed, we all have to recognize that some of them are hideous. The proper solution should be to talk to the developer but be prepared to hear a “no!” about your submission as the developer can have a kind of emotional bond to it or your own design may be as crappy or even crappier. The proper solution is what we already have, let the user customize them;
– At this point we already should have, but don’t yet, separated icons for applications and for other classes/uses, i.e., actions, categories, devices, mimetypes, emblems, places, preferences and status. It should not be a concern of the developer what icon I prefer as an “open” or “save” metaphor (for the later, using a floppy disk is kind of appalling). Better yet, they should, in my opinion, be tinted if the user want it so to go well with the selected color theme. Bonus point to interfaces that can do that (none that I know yet).
By myself, I would prefer that each class could be selected individually and for different uses, i.e., for toolbars and embedding on interface objects distinct from general representation. I really like to have very simple and colored icons on toolbars and similar interface objects that I make match color schemes, and colorful 3D (i.e., with some depth) on things like reports of errors, warnings and information and for documents mimetypes.
I have customized the hell out of old KDE oxygen icon theme and, now deceased, gnome high resolution icon theme and combined them with a lot of “high contrast” icons I collected or created to achieve just that. Now it has more than 5000 graphic elements and a couple of scripts to help customization. Once I find it to be at “bugs” acceptable level, I will publish them.
I’m with the gnome devs. Themeing is dumb. I will never not be convinced of that. But yeah, its open source so they can’t really tell you how to use their software or what you do with it. But its good advice none the less.
Why is it dumb? i am visually impaired, but not blind. I need my controls to stick out so i can see them more easily. Gnome has none of that, it is all flat.
And no high-contrast is just as annoying as for regular people.
Ah, sorry. I’ll admit, I didn’t consider the perspective of the visually impaired. For those of us with normal vision, its silly. I do think all UI’s should be accessible to all users. If it doesn’t then that’s a bug and should be fixed by default Those with disabilities should have a minimal effort to get a usable system.
What I wouldn’t want to happen, is for devs to just do a theming engine and stop there and rely on the community to create a usable interface for those with disabilities.
No, GTK theme editing is dumb. I’ve known this since GTK2 days.
GTK wasn’t designed as a desktop-wide theme framework for apps. I can make *massive* changes to the way my applications look under KDE, without changing how they function, or causing any of the breakage described in the Gnome developer rant.
Maybe they should try QT (which I’m sure has it’s own issues, but as an end-user, I’m blissfully unaware of them).
I don’t theme my desktop anymore, haven’t for years. But I do like my distro of choice (Ubuntu) that has a awesome looking theme (Ambiance before, Yaru now). That being said testing out Fedora on a spare laptop after over decade the new Adwiata theme is pretty nice.
The writer would have a point if it weren’t for the fact that 99.9% of UI-designers are complete and utter fucking retards…
devs usually are not usability experts, nor are they designers.
So theming is more important then they realize, especially for visually impaired people.
And “branding” is really not that important. The functionality should be the most important “branding”-factor.
Not interested in hearing devs whine about people theme’ing their apps considering how many times the usability of app X, Y, and Z increased due to installing a better/well-thought out theme. If they insist on pushing the issue then perhaps they should do so only after having spent time getting better at design.