I’m noticing more and more Apps actively trying to avoid Themes and instead opting for the fixed default look. Even some of the Default Gnome Apps. And then there are initiatives like Please don’t theme our apps. Is this the slow death of GTK Themes, and if yes, why?
Exactly, but even the Official Gnome Settings don’t work with GTK anymore?! I just don’t get why…
Because GNOME aren’t interested in building a desktop that works well with non-GNOME programs.
One day, GNOME will be seen as those arseholes who tried to fragment further an already small and fragmented environment, for petty reasons like “i has a vizhun”.
That day was yesterday, by the way.
I’m pretty sure it was years (lots of them) ago. But maybe that’s just me.
Days, years, they’re all in the bottomless past. Might as well never have happened.
(Serious now, as the above is just me being silly: 13 years, with the release of GNOME 3.0.)
It was 1.2 for me, when they broke the window manager.
They get paid to do this, btw
Do you have further info? That’s a thing that I’d like to dig further into - why GNOME went from “decent but heavy desktop environment” to “oh look «those guys»
/me facepalms”.The main devs at the center of every gnome related drama consist of a few particular individuals who are paid by red hat. I believe the original developer Miguel de Icaza left the gnome project and joined microsoft, and from that point the project made it’s focus on replicating mac os and blindly follow some supposed “vision” where concepts like theming don’t exist. They even explicitly stated they don’t care about cross desktop compatibility and would rather have a separate operating system for gnome. Any further than this and they’ll call you a conspiracy theorist.
Thank you for the info. That’s… sad, really.
I’m probably one now - it was inevitable to connect GNOME’s obtuseness to Red Hat violating the GPL. It sounds a lot like IBM trying to make its own operating system, lacking the means to do so, and exploiting open source to do it for them.
It’s not that deep lol. They just want to avoid writing extra code to make their apps and toolkit compatible with the wider linux desktop. Being the closest to an “official” desktop environment and having paid volunteers, they have a certain responsibility to make their things desktop agnostic. But they act entitled and really just want to minimize their work. Gtk 3 and below were close to perfect. Gtk 4 and libadwaita are the embodiment of everything wrong with gnome.
But why would they make their own Apps non-GTK (Gnome Software Store, Gnome Settings, System Monitor…)?
What do you mean?
All of these programs use GTK.
Because they created libadwaita and don’t care for anything else. In fact GNOME developers haven’t cared about users for a long time…
it’s just that gnome devs are super fast pace crazy scientists. anything that sounds wild, they gotta try it and often they have to abandon something that worked fine to do the new experiments. they had custom theme engine plugins as shared object files, JS window management, CSS themes, SVG icons, app specific buttons in title bars, JS extensions and they’re not gonna quit. if you use gnome and you rice your desktop, you better prepare to port your theme at least twice per year.