KDE Plasma 5.18 About To Release While Plasma 5.19 Well Under Way

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.18 About To Release While Plasma 5.19 Well Under Way

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is planned for release on Tuesday, 11 February, which means a mad rush of last minute fixes for this desktop as well as developers already working on Plasma 5.19 that is aiming for release in early June...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.18-Landing

[Britoid]

GTK apps now use the Breeze-GTK theme by default unless a Linux distribution override is in place

I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but this isn't a good idea imo. GTK theming with large changes does break apps, but also a desktop should not be forcefully changing the appearance of apps, that's not what the job of the desktop is and denies the chance for an application author to make their app look how they want. macOS, Windows, Android skins etc do not skin third party apps (HTC tried and got in trouble) and Windows/Mac wouldn't dare ship with a Qt theme.

If a user decides to change it for themselves that's fair game though.

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings (or GTK ones).

[ssokolow]

I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but this isn't a good idea imo. GTK theming with large changes does break apps, but also a desktop should not be forcefully changing the appearance of apps, that's not what the job of the desktop is and denies the chance for an application author to make their app look how they want. macOS, Windows, Android skins etc do not skin third party apps (HTC tried and got in trouble) and Windows/Mac wouldn't dare ship with a Qt theme.

If a user decides to change it for themselves that's fair game though.

There's nothing forceful about it. Qt is just setting the desktop default theme preference for GTK+, same as Windows has been doing for Win32 applications since XP introduced the Luna theming engine. Individual GTK+ applications are free to override it.

It's nothing new either. Qt has had a GTK+ theming control panel for a long time... though it used to be less official. In the bad old days of the early 2000s, there was a roaring trade in matched themes like QtCurve which implemented the same look two or even three times: Once for Qt, once for GTK+ 1.2.x, and once for GTK+ 2.x.

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings (or GTK ones).

GNOME doesn't have to. Until GTK 3.x came around, Qt relied on QGtkStyle (made official in Qt 4, if I remember correctly) which would draw Qt widgets using the GTK+ theming engine, just the same as it attempted to fit in on Windows or MacOS. As of GTK 3, they can't do that anymore, but they do have a QGnomePlatform backend which gets automatically chosen when a GNOME desktop session is detected. It attempts to read and obey settings like the GNOME colour scheme.

[skeevy420]

It's nothing new either. Qt has had a GTK+ theming control panel for a long time... though it used to be less official. In the bad old days of the early 2000s, there was a roaring trade in matched themes like QtCurve which implemented the same look two or even three times: Once for Qt, once for GTK+ 1.2.x, and once for GTK+ 2.x.

Those days sucked major ass.

[skeevy420]

I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but this isn't a good idea imo. GTK theming with large changes does break apps, but also a desktop should not be forcefully changing the appearance of apps, that's not what the job of the desktop is and denies the chance for an application author to make their app look how they want. macOS, Windows, Android skins etc do not skin third party apps (HTC tried and got in trouble) and Windows/Mac wouldn't dare ship with a Qt theme.

If a user decides to change it for themselves that's fair game though.

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings (or GTK ones).

So go use DOS. MS-DOS was good enough then, FreeDOS is good enough now.

The rest of us want themes.

Android Skins is misleading. OEMs and companies can't do that. Third parties and custom roms can and do. There are weird ass laws and copyright infringement and stuff like that involved here. One reason is HTC changing the theme of thrid party stuff can make retards think everything comes from HTC and then Sony gets shade because that HTC Sony app sucks.

[Britoid]

There's nothing forceful about it. Qt is just setting the desktop default theme preference for GTK+, same as Windows has been doing for Win32 applications since XP introduced the Luna theming engine. Individual GTK+ applications are free to override it.

It's nothing new either. Qt has had a GTK+ theming control panel for a long time... though it used to be less official. In the bad old days of the early 2000s, there was a roaring trade in matched themes like QtCurve which implemented the same look two or even three times: Once for Qt, once for GTK+ 1.2.x, and once for GTK+ 2.x.



GNOME doesn't have to. Until GTK 3.x came around, Qt relied on QGtkStyle (made official in Qt 4, if I remember correctly) which would draw Qt widgets using the GTK+ theming engine, just the same as it attempted to fit in on Windows or MacOS. As of GTK 3, they can't do that anymore, but they do have a QGnomePlatform backend which gets automatically chosen when a GNOME desktop session is detected. It attempts to read and obey settings like the GNOME colour scheme.

QGnomePlatform doesn't theme apps. Qt also supports multiple backends that allow it to look native in many places (many Qt apps bake their styling anyway), GTK doesn't, injecting CSS into GTK applications is like injecting CSS into Reddit and expecting the same CSS to work on Phoronix.

[Britoid]

The rest of us want themes.

Re-read my comment, I said I'm not referring to users theming applications, that's different.

[skeevy420]

Re-read my comment, I said I'm not referring to users theming applications, that's different.

As a Plasma user, that's a feature that we want. We want to set our theme in one standardized place and have as many applications as possible have that theme and look.

If not the desktop or the desktop's underlying toolkit, what do you suppose people should use to achieve the goal of a consistent looking system? The previous method of multiple theme programs was awful.

[M@yeulC]

I'm going to probably get a lot of hate for saying this, but this isn't a good idea imo. GTK theming with large changes does break apps, but also a desktop should not be forcefully changing the appearance of apps, that's not what the job of the desktop is and denies the chance for an application author to make their app look how they want. macOS, Windows, Android skins etc do not skin third party apps (HTC tried and got in trouble) and Windows/Mac wouldn't dare ship with a Qt theme.

If a user decides to change it for themselves that's fair game though.

Endless BSD vs GPL debate here, but as a user that's not how I want it. I want all my apps to look dull and functional. I want them to all look and work the same. That's a personal preference, of course, and as such it's worthless to argue or force everyone else to agree. But I guess that's one that tends to resonate with KDE users. As for theming, I prefer to have a single setting to change everything than to go over every single app and spend hours customizing application-specific setting files :/

[andreduartesp]

For balance, GNOME does not set any Qt theme settings (or GTK ones).

Gnome does set GTK theme, and some distro set their own too. GTK is unusable without a theme. And Gnome just don't have to set a Qt default theme, because Qt apps just follow the Gnome System Settings config by default.

By the other hand Plasma guys need to set breeze theme on GTK apps to make it follow the user setting on Kde System Settings, by default GTK apps just ignore this configs.

As user I expect my changes on system settings changes any app I use, on Mac or Windows GTK apps follow the colors and style from system config, and this is what any user wants, on plasma thats not true.

PS. We are talking about default theme, you can always change the default in System Settings.