> 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.
In the case of GNOME it is not apathy towards choice but corporate backing. Companies that do business with Linux like Redhat, Canonical, will benefit greatly if the vast number of options that the Linux ecosystem has can be culled to a certain approved stack, at least on their supported platforms. Since they also employ or sponsor a large amount of development within the ecosystem, other players are left either to grudgingly adopt them or seethe in frustration. KDE would've gone the way of Xfce etc had it not already had considerable momentum from the earliest days. Despite being an even larger collection of s/w than GNOME and strongly supported by SuSE, they're still second place by quite a way. 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, perhaps trending towards an absolute monopoly in the future, like Google on the Web.
> 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.
> 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.
openSUSE has a KDE team, but I'm not sure to what extent they do upstream KDE development. [0] Also, openSUSE does not have a default desktop choice. I don't know where the enterprise offering differs from the community offering in these matters.
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.
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.
You can have as much snark as you want. I specifically said that Linux should remain the platform of choice, just that the defaults should be stronger so that it's a more consistent and approachable platform for people.
GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.
> 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.
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. Apple's ecosystem is expensive and locked in while gnome/linux is open and works with as much hardware and software as possible, on top of that it's free. Also the software experience is different too, while on Mac software that involves any personalization or enhances the desktop is paid, while gnome/linux is free and almost all software that enhances the desktop is also free and open source software. Their opinions on UI/UX might be similar but that's where the majority of their similarities end.
> 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.
>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.
To be ultra clear here: I'm not saying it has to be GNOME. I legitimately only said GNOME to toss you a bone when you responded with a needlessly sarcastic comment. ;P
It could be any DE, even a newly created one.
No part of your posts feels productive, and to be honest they feel like emotional backlash.
> 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.
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.
Speaking about my net postive broadband and 4G experience from the past 4-5 years living in a metro city (Kolkata where its not even BJP) in India is "misleading everyone" and "nationalism" ? What level of mental gymnastics did you have you perform to even arrive at this conclusion ?
To counter your 2 arguments,
Argument 1: Before Jio even penetrated the market we had a bunch of different operators ( Docomo, aircel and even airtel etc ) who charged a bomb for literally 1GB of data, I remember having to shell out a premium on my docomo during 2015 just for some talktime and 1GB which I had to use cautiously for browsing. Even now after JIO incrementing prices its still cheaper than what the operators use to charge before 2015-16. You get a freaking 1GB per day and unlimited talktime now.
argument 2: Growing up we had BSNL broadband run by your so called "elected left government". It was ABSOLUTELY SHIT. Words cannot describe how pathetic BSNL's service and speeds were. But as per your last sentence there was NO other choice, it was a damned monopoly and literally a shit one, people had airtel/docomo dongles but it used to cost a bomb. Then came a lot of small scale ISPs and also JIO/airtel who provided insane speeds at decent prices which the general public had yet to experience and made it accessible to people. I personally use a local one, it says unlimited and I have it pushed to over 2TB in a month by downloading a shit tonne amount of 4K remuxes, installing epics/steams video games. The speeds did not slow down at all. I think I might be in maybe 1%-2% of all people in India who has even gone upto a TB of data in a month. I don't know if there is actually a cap at 3.3TB but your phrasing sounds like every indian household uses 3.3 TB of data every month and cries in a corner about it not being truly unlimited.
I cannot believe the levels of cynicism in your comment, how naive and rose tinted your your views are about India's history with internet services. If you are mad with the insane internet infrastructure advancements this government has brought , I hope you stay mad.
> 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?
>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
Please stop fanning this flame war. You're making it worse and choosing to omit that the bug was reopened after a better argument was made in favor it, just to make a point and attack them, please stop doing that. I'm like you and I just want the bug to be fixed, these kinds of bad faith comments calling people "dense" aren't helping. This is trying to paint someone as being stubborn here after they already changed their mind and did what you want. Just take the victory, you don't have to be a sore winner.
>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?
GTK_THEME is mainly a setting for developers, you should probably not be using that unless you're developing a theme to be upstreamed with an app. 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.
If you're interested to actually help, what you should do is contribute towards fixing issues with the upstream theme. 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. And if you want to do more, you can contribute towards the libadwaita theming API which is intended to be a real theming API and not a hack like GTK_THEME or the tweak tool. It's still being designed so now would be the time to start contributing if you want to get in early.
>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.
That those libraries have widgets and skins that developers really like and want to use? I'm sorry I just don't see what you're getting at here. Do you expect GTK to try to please everyone by merging all the widgets from libadwaita and libgranite and deprecating those libraries? Because I think that would be a lot worse.
>Even LibreOffice uses libadwaita now.
Actually it doesn't, that was just a proof of concept. But even if they did, it would be entirely optional.
> 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
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.
Sadly it's not possible to design a GUI that has correct spacing and stays consistent with every font choice. Variable-width fonts don't function like that, widgets sized to a piece of text will have their layout interfered with when the font size changes.
>this is new information because this blog post... Now I'm wondering if this information was intentionally withheld in that blog post.
It wasn't withheld and it's not new information. You're still assuming bad faith and you need to stop this. Notice the part where it says "Compared to GTK 3", if you're familiar with theming GTK3 you should be well aware of the limitations with those themes. Not much has changed there at all. Theming in this way is essentially just hacking the hardcoded colors to be different.
>The contrast between the background and text in dark mode is too high for me
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. That is going to be a general problem with lots of programs or websites that you visit and reskinning each of them is a huge pain and is not guaranteed to work. Doubly so if you use apps that have any other toolkits or use a custom toolkit, the contrast will still be inconsistent. I speak from experience here. Theming is only a band-aid, I suggest at minimum turning the contrast down on your display or permanently enabling night shift mode. That may not make the contrast perfect but it would at least ensure you never see any high contrast text in any app.
Another option may be to pursue something like a gnome extension that dynamically adjusts the screen's gamma and contrast based on the dynamic range calculated from the contents of the windows. That should be a lot more useful and flexible than manually reskinning every app you use. And it works in other situations like for example, if you have two apps side by side and one has a brighter background color than the other, it would notice that's happening and dynamically adjust accordingly so you don't strain your eyes when moving from one app to the other. I think it's misplaced to present this as a theming problem when this sounds like a general usability problem.
If you really do think it's a theming problem then maybe you could campaign for an officially supported low-contrast option, but that would be far away because every toolkit would have to implement it, and old apps will probably not be updated to support it, and it still probably won't work on arbitrary web sites. From a libadwaita perspective the recoloring API may do everything that you need, in my experience it's web sites that are the worst offender when it comes to eye-straining themes.
>I'm fairly certain that this issue won't be entertained
This doesn't make any sense. Both of those issues you linked did get entertained, and the maintainer was still open to patches to fix the font issue.
>that "real" theming API just changes accent colors and wouldn't solve my issue
>If there are no feasible alternatives to develop GTK4 only apps besides creating your own widgets from scratch
This is the same as it was in GTK3. It hasn't changed at all, the only difference is the library is called libadwaita instead of libhandy. You also don't have to recreate widgets from scratch, that developer appears to be confused. It's certainly possible for an app developer to reskin the libadwaita widgets. But of course, just as in GTK3 they would have to put in the work to write and maintain their own skin, and ship that as part of their app. Or they can just wait for the recoloring API.
> 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.
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?
>I said that it's a problem in the dark version of the Adwaita theme.
I don't understand what this has to do with Adwaita either, as I said this can affect every toolkit and every app and every web site because most of them have their own theme. For example this site we're on now has an IMO awful default theme that strains my eyes, and doesn't have any official support for theming. We can't blame GNOME for that one.
>It's the only solution that comes to mind
Actually I mentioned a few other solutions that could work. Theming is not even a real solution sometimes, for example some closed source apps just don't support theming at all and can't be easily hacked to change the colors. If that happens you're pretty screwed, unless you pursue an alternate solution.
If the other GNOME apps decide to support these type of themes it will be a while before that happens too because their ports to GTK4 and libadwaita are not finished, and because they will probably wait for the recoloring API instead of doing it all in CSS like the text editor currently does.
>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 this isn't an argument in favor of "theming and user choice", this is an argument in favor of providing a low-contrast option for accessibility.
>unsupported, generally looked down upon
This is incorrect. There are several official extensions maintained by GNOME developers.
>and called as hacks by the GNOME team, just like GNOME tweak tool and GTK_THEME
That's somewhat true, extensions can be very hacky. It is however a lot easier to maintain one extension then it is to maintain thousands of themes for every possible toolkit, app, web site. If you view theming as the only other solution then your choice is really with choosing one hack versus another hack. If you're not planning to develop any themes or extensions and maintain them yourself indefinitely then I really don't understand why you would even care about themes at all, the best option for you would be a low-contrast toggle.
I think you may be confused about the full definition of "unsupported" here. The tweak tool and GTK_THEME (and in some sense, extensions) are not considered unsupported because nobody wants those features. The missing piece is for somebody to figure out what a reliable solution is and make everything work correctly with a real API, and then volunteer to support that for years.
>Does it allow changing the background color of a window and foreground color of the text in a GTK app
In some way it does. I don't know why you're asking me this because I can't decide for you, if you're an app or theme developer you need to look at the draft yourself to see if it would be adequate for you. From what I hear, it should roughly do what you can see in those text editor screenshots I linked above.
>would it be officially supported?
I don't know what the status of it is, I only saw the draft. You would have to ask the developers. IRC or Matrix is a good place to ask questions.
> 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.
> Does GTK4 provide any viable model of development if one doesn't want to target GNOME or elementary?
It's possible to make apps using GTK3 without libhandy, so I don't see why you couldn't make apps using GTK4 without libadwaita.
Technically, libadwaita is just a bunch of widgets. Apparently it's a very useful bunch of widgets.
> Even LibreOffice has now decided to use libadwaita. Does that mean LibreOffice's GTK version is only intended for GNOME?
I guess so. Either that, or they're intending to use libadwaita in an “off-label” way.
> If yes, GTK4 is basically a toolkit for GNOME masquerading as a general purpose toolkit.
The whole reason libadwaita's widgets are not just part of GTK is so that GTK doesn't have to cater to GNOME, and can be a more general-purpose toolkit. Libadwaita 1.0 was just released last month, so presumably it will take some time for that to come to fruition.
As someone with firsthand experience in this field: it's not worth your time. Getting GTK4 to work in other desktops is a shitshow in the first place (it has horrible rendering issues on x11/Plasma configs), but all of the good stuff like gtk::Builder and connect-closures have been removed, making imperative development an enormous pain in the ass. If you still manage to make an app despite that mess, you'll be left with horrible font rendering issues that can only be fixed with a very specific Flatpak configuration (hope you didn't want to run your own app natively!) and by the time you've got it all figured out you'll probably be looking into Qt.
Please, just use GTK2 or GTK3 if you're planning on making non-GNOME apps. GTK4 is simply not finished yet.
> ...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
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.
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.
I don’t think libadwaita is a problem in the direction you’re saying at all—it’s a comparatively slim layer mostly of additional components that should generally not be all that difficult to make optional if you desire. And you can easily use GTK without it if you want.
Rather, I think the problem is that libadwaita hasn’t gone far enough. The advertised theory is that GTK is agnostic, and libadwaita gets you GNOME HIG stuff, but the fact of the matter is that GTK is still heavily GNOME. Their attitude to overlay scrollbars is a good example (though hardly the only one): they deliberately removed the admittedly-clumsy system-wide configurability that was present in GTK 3 (not sure if themes were able to control it before, but I think not, which was itself a regression from GTK+ 2), and have declared that overlay scrollbars are a feature of GTK 4 and there will be no attempt to comply to system conventions, or any way for users to change the behaviour; individual apps can still control it, but there will be no conventional way of switching this, which de facto means that almost no apps will provide any switch for it, and so users that want real scrollbars or want platform convention compliance are left high and dry. They also deliberately dismantled the module loading technique, which was a way of fixing things GTK made a mess of and allowing improved platform conformance support, including things like global menus (it was admittedly technically unsound, but it worked).
The issue (as I see it) is that libadwaita is GNOME's bartering chip. For years they've been anal-retentive about custom theming, be it their infinite diatribes about how XDG only needs to respect 2 themes, the "Don't Theme My App" disaster or their ongoing attempts to put custom stylesheets further and further away from the user's control. GTK4, libadwaita and Flatpak are their leverage here. Each of these systems, when taken separately, make it difficult to theme your app (though still technically possible). When incorporated though, it becomes outright unreasonable to theme things. This is wholly their fault, and this notion that "they didn't know what they were doing!" makes me roll my eyes. They know exactly what they did, and their behavior has been insanely harmful to the rest of the community.
As a matter of fact, I think the Linux desktop might just be permanently split as a result of their actions now. It's a more extreme version of the old GTK2 vs GTK3 argument, but this time the divide is more extreme. Wayland is borderline unusable on anything but GNOME. GTK4 refuses to integrate with any desktop but GNOME. libadwaita is dividing the development of applications to "GNOME app" and "not GNOME app". Flatpak is a broken olive branch that is in a comical state of neglect (and only integrates well with GNOME anyways).
This segregation has to stop, or it will kill the Linux community along with it. In their attempts to make Linux competitive with Windows and MacOS, the GNOME maintainers have completely quit listening to their users and sabotaged everything that people genuinely liked about Linux.
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.
> 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.
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.