GNOME's Platform Design Continues Evolving From Dark Mode To Toasts

[oiaohm]

Not only him but sytem76 devs also make a statement that GTK and Gnome is going against free choose. So Solus and Pop devs are wrong..... uhhh yeah. The only ignorant ones are Gnome devs.

I would say everyone is kind of in the wrong.
https://stopthemingmy.app/ when you have applications developers backing a site like this you do have a problem.

Has system76 themes in Pop OS result in applications not being usable the answer is yes. Has the same thing happened with Solus and answer is yes. Free choice is double sided. Free choice can truly be harmful. Lot of the parties who are like how free choose is going to be nuked by Gnome developers being hard ass on how gnome applications can be themed have been be ignorant to the harm their custom themes have been doing to application developers and end users. In fact at times not even wanting to talk about it.

There is huge mount of ignorance to go around here. I am not saying gnome or applications developers are 100 percent in the right either. Like it or not the ones raising the lack of free choice with the theming change most of them have been totally disregarding the harm they have been doing.

Yes there has been a big problem of distributions coming into existence the that only difference was really the theme to some other distribution then failing into maintenance hell. Yes there has been a long term problem with how distributions theme and the adverse side effects.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/09/08/stop-using-custom-windows-10-themes-microsoft-account-credential-theft-pass-the-hash/

Please note ignoring the harm theming case cause is not just restrict to Linux.

Lot of ways I do see gnomes move as heavy handed. But something does need to change.

At a min what was need was a theme assessment tool.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

Lets say you are doing a website you are theming it you should be referring wcag to make sure you have not screwed up you CSS that will result in a non human usable website.

Yes there are automated tools to check that your colour contrasts are right to wcag.

This is the reality restriction is going to be required on what a theme can be. Or at least that if a particular theme when desktop start up it put up a warning message that you are using a low quality theme that will possible break applications.

Just think about it if this site had white text and white background you are screwed right. This is a real problem you sometimes run into with applications. There is also a need for applications on colour of text and other things to be aware of contrast issues. Yes it easy for a developer to type in X colour and be done but in a lot of cases this result in nightmare when you change theme as well. This is one of those horrible problems distribution and theme makers need to have their freedom restricted and so does application developers.

Allowing applications developers to have a theme set color mixed with a non theme set color is a path to failure as well. Yes this is the most common cause for applications to have unreadable text.

Fixing the theme problem correctly equals upsetting applications developers, desktop environment developers and distribution developers. As all of them will have to get use to restrictions to reduce the case of applications being rendered useless just because X theme is in use.

[billyswong]

Limited theming is not actually that bad - better to have sane default themes, than a lot of installable eye tearing ones (and that is a lot). Most dark themes are broken in one place or another. If default light and dark themes are good for most people it would be enough to just change color highlights.

Limited theming is doable in pure CSS. https://una.im/css-color-theming/ Even If a theming engine is too old and can't do var() and calc() (or is skipping them for performance reason), one can still build a css generator that let users select colors for a short listed of pre-defined color / density variables, then "compile" any advanced template css into fixed colors for the simpler theming engine. Theme writers can then design freely, create template css, and let users choose a custom color / density accompanying their themes.

[oiaohm]

Limited theming is doable in pure CSS. https://una.im/css-color-theming/ Even If a theming engine is too old and can't do var() and calc() (or is skipping them for performance reason), one can still build a css generator that let users select colors for a short listed of pre-defined color / density variables, then "compile" any advanced template css into fixed colors for the simpler theming engine. Theme writers can then design freely, create template css, and let users choose a custom color / density accompanying their themes.

To be correct that site you have there close

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.design.Contrast

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html

The WCAG standard has a define for how you should calculate the contrast on the web as in as per ISO-9241-3 and ANSI-HFES-100-1988 then define what is classed as acceptable value in WCAG. Sorry to say the maths used on that site you quoted and the site that person got the maths for the contrast is in fact wrong. This happens.

Please note there are 3 levels in WCAG for contrast at this stage. A, AA and AAA. A is barely passing the standard and is not to be used with Text. Yes 2.1 standard says normal sized text has to be 4.5:1 contrast or better that is AA but large text could be 3:1. that is A.

billyswong the idea of let users choose custom color the users really do need some hand holding. The require min contrast between background and foreground colors really does need to get codified into themes. Really does need to validated when a theme is loaded.

Remember CSS with browsers was developed before we started doing WCAG and other things to make sure website were in fact usable. So CSS does not have a integrated WCAG contrast color compare.

Limited themeing to end users can be a really good thing. Particular if the contrast levels requirements embedded in the limited theming solution and are used guide the person into choosing usable settings. So its not like the user set their theme and then one day the open up X application stuff not readable and send bug report to application developer for the application developer to waste time to find out it was just a bad user theme. Please note bad user theme either made by distribution or user.

I am not saying a user should not be allowed to have choice here but there is a case point where you need to warn a user at least if what they are about to-do is not advisable.

WCAG with web sites is slowly seeing website theming mature into something that is end user friendly. We do need for theming on the desktop to mature as well into that user don't make simple errors of setting colors without enough contrast and so on. We also need application code to mature that mixing application define color with a theme provided foreground or background is also a no go in most cases It would be lovely if this could be a build error/warning.

[You-]

lol? obviously gnome devs are smarter than ubuntu reskin devs(and than random phoronix commenters btw)

I dont think we should get Ubuntu devs involved in this - they are on records saying they have a different view from System76 and System76 developers should not try to speak for them.

[omer666]

The real fun here is that we have people complaining about themability, the same people who complain that the year of Linux desktop isn't gonna happen if we don't take some pages from Apple and Microsoft's book.
Less customisation means less varied configurations, which means more reliable and more stable experience.
As already said, it is very well documented that the push for libadwaita is an effort to split GNOME UI development from mainline GTK, so it should not bother anyone. I don't understand how GNOME devs doing their thing aside can be Red Hat conspiring or devs being "ignorants."

[krzyzowiec]

"We are unable to come up with a good theming support/API, so let's remove the old CSS based theming altogether and make it inaccessible for most people out there"

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/53

[oleid]

truth that GNOME has made not just blatantly clear, but explicitly so, ever since GTK3 was introduced and big chunks of theming support were dropped specifically because GNOME devs were butthurt that nobody liked the direction they were taking GNOME 3 in.

When even they admit that removing theme support is one of the *goals* for GNOME, you claiming that others saying so is making "bad assumptions" isn't exactly credible.

But you noticed that not being able to theme is limited to libadweita, not Gtk4, du you?

[curfew]

"We are unable to come up with a good theming support/API, so let's remove the old CSS based theming altogether and make it inaccessible for most people out there".

This claim is bullshit, sorry. Gnome isn't doing away with CSS theming. GTK is also not doing away with CSS theming. It's just that the required features for enabling end-users to switch styles is moving from core GTK to Gnome. The required plumbing, however, will still be accessible to programmers.

[White Wolf]

lol? obviously gnome devs are smarter than ubuntu reskin devs(and than random phoronix commenters btw)

lol? not really, as more users and as we see developers/distro maintainers complain for gnome shifting from desktop-orientated to making some tablet-hybrid desktop with one theme for all, so I would say they become dumber. As right now newest Gnome workflow is the worst for desktop experience. As a long gnome user I don't like this direction and because of that I'm using Budgie now with is what Gnome should be. Btw random comments are important: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/render...164&type=stats
Gnome will kill itself in a long run, KDE is raising and more people are using it than Gnome. I hope Budgie EFL will take spot from Gnome in future.
"The GTK devs / Gnome devs are really more and more a closed ecosystem where they no longer care about any impact on Linux as a whole, only about Gnome and don’t really care what happens to anyone else using “their” toolkit. They’re basically Apple, but in FOSS clothing."
Nice podcast with Joshua Strobl, nails it perfectly :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGOOE-Wvid4

[xhustler]

Am fairly certain some will want to slap me for this but the correct answer is - EFL, EFL, EFL, ... EFL.