Can’t they theme gtk4/libadwaita without editing libadwaita? Like gradience do
I’ve made a bunch of libadwaita apps, because I like its UI/UX not because I want to break other Desktop Environment. That would mean even more fragmentation.
If they did you’d have one theme that works with Gnome and one that works with Mint. Both of which would be irrelevant to someone using GTK apps on, say, XFCE on Arch.
Aren’t mint themes gtk themes?
Libadwaita is only compatible with gnome and only works with gnome. Other DE’s can try to make it work in their DE, but the experience for them is hostile.
To put it mildly, gnome devs are being dicks about it as much as they can be, because they consider themselves the only “real” desktop environment to Linux.
If you want your apps to be cross platform, you can just use gtk3/gtk4 instead, or any other ui library. Even QT.
I use gnome ATM because I think paperwm is the best desktop experience on any OS, but the gnome DE devs are just assholes and they break my heart.
I use Gnome too and I don’t like their attitude against other DEs. Their attitude is becoming a real threat to Linux interoperability.
At least we got flatpaks.Libadwaita is only compatible with gnome and only works with gnome. Other DE’s can try to make it work in their DE, but the experience for them is hostile.
Not sure what you mean with “compatible”, as libadwaita apps are supposed to work on other DEs as well. It might not fit visually with them, but that’s not being incompatible.
Gnome can’t use the argument that “theming our apps is incompatible” and then at the same time not allow other DEs to manage window controls and the like to be compatible. Shit attitude and shit arguments.
GNOME devs never said that theming is incompatible (just “not supported”), and you’re still not explaining whay you mean with “incompatible” either. Managing window controls also doesn’t seem a requirement to be “compatible”, as the app still runs fine even with client side decorations (again, it just won’t fit visually with the rest of the system).
And by the way, the problem is not theming per-se, but the fact that apps get themed by default, they inevitably break by default, and app developers are left to deal with that. Nobody ever tried to improve the situation so the solution they came up with is to have their apps always look the same.
They could just accept GTK 4. Anyway, they will need some GTK 4/libadwaita support as there are an increasing number of apps that use it.
Hello fellow citizen, I almost agree but libadwaita is inherently gnome’s thing, and libadwaita apps are usually closely built into the gnome desktop, so using it outside of gnome seems weird. Kinda like using Dolphin outside of KDE (tho that’s just because of qt). They want to be able to integrate their forks visually.
I don’t see libadadwaita as progress. Last week, simple-scan got an update and is stuck to a dark theme since then. To change it, i would have to install gnome-settings and klick a button there. Can’t do that via my usual keyboard-combo.
edit: edited Gnome’s ‘don’t theme our apps’ away since it’s beside the point.
If you actually read through that they say theme away to your heart’s content, just please don’t report issues to the app developer, report it to the theme developer.
They say that lots of time they could spend developing is managing and investigating bugs that end up being due to the user installing some random poorly-made theme, wasting precious dev time that they are donating for free.
It’s a perfectly reasonable request, and has no bearing on whether an app is proprietary or not.
E: the guy above has drastically changed their comment so now mine probably doesn’t make sense.
If a theme is able to break core functionality then your theming system/guidelines needs to be fixed. And it to be more accessible to theme designers so these problems don’t occur in the first place.
That’s bs. No matter how good your theming system is, it can’t fix a bunch of things. Even something as basic as text being shown against a background with not enough contrast.
Theming has been known to cause issues on literally every DE. You can’t stop people from theming poorly, or ban bugs, they’re both just part of the landscape of downloading random themes and applying it to all your apps.
And random dev shouldn’t be on the hook for third party themes that cause issues. Nor should they be expected to drop everything and investigate bugs in somebody else’s theme project. That stuff should be reported to the theme developer.
Most Linux app devs are volunteers and their time shouldn’t be wasted investigating theming-related issues. Report it to the theme developer.
I admit i stopped reading after i got alienated by the bullet points. And Gnomes points after are nice and all, but only caring about their own vision is not the solution either, especially if you create one of the two main GUI frameworks. A tool is not an art piece but something that has to adapt to the user.
So you tried to shit on developers by posting a link to a completely reasonable request (“theming is fine but please be mindful of wasting our limited time by bombarding us with bug reports related to janky themes”) that you hadn’t even read. Got it.
People need to understand that none of this development is free. These people donate their time to make these projects for us to have, completely free of charge. Investigating a bug can take hours, or days, sometimes longer. Imagine doing that and it turns out there wasn’t a bug with your program at all, it was with a theme that the user installed. I’d also be pissed off about the time I’m donating for the good of the community being wasted.
No, i didn’t. Calm down.
You absolutely did lol. You complained about them and it reeked of entitlement. You don’t have a God-given right for the developer of every app to investigate issues with somebody else’s themes.
I see you’ve edited away much of it though. Sneaky.
Yeah, and i stated why. Stop trolling.
The
gsettingscommand can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that’s where the setting actually resides. It’s a pain to do, but that means it’s possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won’t get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.
It’s currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.
(In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn’t recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)
Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.
gsettings didn’t work in my case. Which is why i guess it’s libadwaita. Btw, i’m on XFCE.
edit: though, toggling light/dark via gsettings might work.
editedit: it didn’t. But GTK_THEME=<theme> did. Which is kinda troublesome still, since you can’t switch session variable content for the current session. Needs a wrapper script now.
You can use gradence to set a custom theme.
Once in a while I check the installed packages for a possible dependency on GTK and when I find a program which has one, I look for an alternative to have one dependency less.
The last time I replaced simple-scan with skanlite and it is a much much better scanning program and with a more pleasant ui on top.
For some reason it is not yet on Flathub
Assuming you are using Mint, Skanlite can be found in the software manager.
I am not using Mint and it is also in the Fedora repos, but there is no reason for it to not be on Flathub. Maybe when I find the time I try to package it.
Honestly, for me, if it’s available from my OS’s repos and not horribly out of date, I use that one.
I’d rather have my app just work, not consume twice the resources and actually listen to my theme (inc the mouse, somehow)
On KDE Plasma theming and Cursors work with Flatpaks normally
bazzite defaults to the Breeze cursor
I changed it to the Breeze Light cursor
Flatpaks (so 90% of graphical stuff on bazzite) show me the Breeze (dark) cursor
I experienced the same on Debian KDE
It does not work fine on all KDE Plasmas, but it sure must be great for some KDE Plasma users out there that their cursor theme works in Flatpak
Still eats ludicrous amounts of resources and makes file management and sharing through the app a bitch, either way
Gnome might as well be proprietary with their shit attitude.
No way I’m gonna scroll this 15min article to spot where that’s mentioned
TL;DR They want to push even more other desktop environments and distros to use XApps, because a lot of gnome’s ex-gtk3 apps now are half-broken and looks alien inside Mint and other distros like Xubuntu.
If an application doesn’t support Cinnamon we can’t ship with it in our Cinnamon edition. The same goes for MATE and Xfce.
[…]
We could do like Ubuntu 24.04. They provide a finished product with a high level of integration. The way they do that is by modifying libAdwaita to support their theme: Yaru. We could do the same with Mint-Y. It would make all GNOME applications look nice in Linux Mint, but we’d have to remove theme selection, since it would only work with Mint-Y. In the long term it wouldn’t solve the main issue either: These applications are designed for a desktop which is more and more different to ours by the day. It’s not just a question of themes or look. Today these apps are losing menubars, themes, tomorrow they might come with no minimize button or anything GNOME doesn’t use.
Pretty reasonable
All I want is the ability to disable client side decorations without having to force xwayland with gtk3-classic
How are they going to stop using zenity? it is a dependency of steam. And right now the gtk4 version needs a bunch of hacks to follow the system theme as well.
Deleted by user.
It’s basically GNOME specific version of GTK4. There are various issues that arise from that but one of the main ones is that it is not themeable at all at present. The GNOME adiwaita theme is built into the library and is the only theme.
It is supposedly going to have a themeing system but it will still break with existing GTK themes.
As the Mint blog alludes to, it also embeds fundamental UI choices that may make sense for GNOME but may be jarring or out of place in other desktops such as Cinnamon, or XFCE. They cite the example that GNOME could unilaterally remove the minimise button from the apps because it’s not something that exists in GNOME.
There is a concern that it effectively breaks the existing app ecosystem and will deviate further and further from the established GTK norms. To be fair is kinda what it’s supposed to do - I think it’s it’s supposed to be a better replacement that allows GNOME to forge it’s own path.
Edit: worth noting that the Mint blog post says they could make their own theme within their own version of the library but it could only fit with one GTK fheme. So it can be customise in a limited distro level way but still can’t follow the basic themeing across the desktop if you chose anything else (at present).
To be honest, I’m kind of afraid that Linux will go the day of Windows with zero UI consistency because of apps that can’t be themed to even look vaguely similar or may even take over the window decorations.
I kinda liked it more when gtk-qt was still a thing and you could actually get a semi-unified look for the while environment.
Linux has never had UI consistency. If you came to it during a brief period of time when a select subset of software that you used seemed to share some consistency, that’s was coincidental.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Software should be in constant flux and evolving. As part of that alternatives constantly compete and on Linux all the upheaval is done in the open.
Gtk and QT weren’t consistent but there was a Gtk style that used QT as a rendering backend, which allowed you to get some semblance of consistency. Then they came up with Adwaita, which doesn’t really allow that anymore.
Qt is a thing. Idk why all these environments are messing around with a GTK that’s being sabotaged/neglected by GNOME while Qt just keeps working.
License.
How does Gradience works then?
“Fake News!” /s
Yes, the minimize button can go away as soon there is an extension that re-adds it for users running gnome classic (a set of gnome shell extensions which includes a classic task bar).
