Libadwaita 1.0 Released For Kicking Off A New Year Of GNOME App Development

[Debunez]

I find all this obsession with desktop styling or customization through extensions ludicrous. Maybe for hobbyists but as a professional I want my DE to be confident about the experience its providing and just work. Just looking through the GNOME subreddit, so many bugs are reported about basic DE functionality being broken due to installed extensions either from the user or distro maintainers. If I was a member of the GNOME team this would infuriate me and would easily push me to remove all support for extensions period. You get what you get, don't like it then just use a different DE. It seems they may be moving more in this direction and I applaud them for it.

I can understand different distros wanting to "style" themselves from branding purposes or make slight tweaks to the DE layout due to philosophical decisions around HIG. But this type of fragmentation is what I believe to be killing Linux desktop adoption for the mainstream. This isn't "innovation". Styling your DE to look orange vs blue vs red or having a dock bar vs no dock bar isn't helping innovate on the Linux DE experience.

Maybe these larger distro projects could focus their efforts on improving things like compositor performance, software installation workflows, more GUIs to help people less terminal savy, BUGFIXES? These are things that make a real difference. Oh, and the last thing you should do is waste valuable FOSS momentum by trying to write your own DE in a new catchy language because your feelings were hurt.

[You-]

am not sure how this will materialize as I was under the impression that libadwaita will be "totally 100% never changing API stable". Maybe this is not the case any more but this does defeat the purpose of cutting off a proper "theming" API.

Change? No. Add? yes.

There will be additions and the developers have been careful to try and make sure there wont be any breaking changes after the 1.0 release to add the new features they want. Any new API before a major 2.0 release will be additive and optional.

The closest example is how dark mode was added to libadwaita vs libhandy. In libadwaita, it is on by default and apps have to turn it off if they dont want it. In libhandy, which was already stable for gtk3, its off by default. Apps, once tested to make sure it works properly can turn the feature on.

It will be the same with the programatic API for recoloring etc. The app authors will need to opt in to allowing it. Once a 2.0 rolls around, the option could once again be flipped to be on by default and apps that dont want it have to turn it off.

EDIT - just to add, this is my understanding from following a lot of detailed discussions. As I am not a developer or involved in developing the library or the features, I could be wrong.

[tenplus1]

Back in the days of blackbox users had a set template they used and styled it using line colours, patterns, fills and gradients to the extent that many desktops looked totally unique and different. One the Amiga they had MUI gui that used the same principles but added the 8 image borders to the mix, so why in 2022 is gnome/gtk still limiting users in theming when even the older apps had a better system of use that could make not only the desktop but each program unique looking ?!?!

[uid313]

So how does developers know if they should write their app in plain GTK or also use libadwaita?

[grung]

Eclipse originated the SWT widget toolkit. SWT's big advantage over Swing on Linux is wxWidgets-like support for delegating to GTK for drawing.

Thats right and it is quite interesting that Eclipse looks good on MacOS and Windows where UI customization is not that great. I think that it is hard for developers to design nice look and feel on Linux because they don't know which theme they should support. If they could assume that by default Eclipse will always run on Adwaita theme they could fine tune the design and make it really usable and beautiful.

Because it is not the case and Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distro it is difficult to guess which theme will be used by the user and what is really the "default" one. With such customization we don't even know which theme developers are using to develop the app. Look at Eclipse docs, there are different GTK themes used:

https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.22/jdt.php

https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.22/pde.php

Given that current theming doesn't really work I think that developers and distributions should at least try to use this new model of enforced theme. If it doesn't work than it can always be reverted.

[Vistaus]

Does it acknowledge that there other desktop environments ?
Does it acknowledge that some of them are not even based on Gnome ?
Does it acknowledge that some users want to have other window decorations or window control buttons (minimize, maximize, close) ?
Does it acknowledge that some users don't want to have everything in the title bar ?

So many questions in such an orderly fashion. Are you, by any chance, related to uid313?

[Vistaus]

The first page I linked is a message basically saying "Please don't implement distro branding beyond things like default desktop background. We don't want it."

People: “Linux needs a standard theme and none of all those distro rebrands and non-working 3rd-party skins!!!”
Also people: “I don't like the standard theme. Linux needs more customization options!!!”

Solus is investigating making a GNOME-less version of Budgie as a result. (Specifically, they're investigating using EFL because they don't want to work in C++ and Qt's Rust support is not great to put it mildly... I say that as a KDE user who's migrating to writing non-trivial programs using PyQt for the frontend and rust-cpython for the interface to the backend.)

EFL? Not sure if that's a good idea. I mean: I like EFL and Enlightenment, but the vast majority of Phoronix members will avoid Solus like the plague now as they hate EFL and Enlightenment.

[slotdime]

@grung
I had the ugly experience of been upgraded from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 on debian. I was using "testing" (my fault). Since then I took the approach
of going elsewere, so I landed on KDE . After KDE 3 to KDE 4 move, I started looking elsewere . I found Cinnamon (4.8.6 on debian 11),
which is what I run today. Actually is stable
I know they run on Xorg, but I don't see THAT speed difference as I'm not a gamer, nor video or image editor or something like that .
Just code, compile, test, build, deploy, etc .

For eclipse (which I use since 3.0 among other ide's) it behaves fine on Cinnamon . I'm on version 2021-12 .

Cheers !

Thats right and it is quite interesting that Eclipse looks good on MacOS and Windows where UI customization is not that great. I think that it is hard for developers to design nice look and feel on Linux because they don't know which theme they should support. If they could assume that by default Eclipse will always run on Adwaita theme they could fine tune the design and make it really usable and beautiful.

Because it is not the case and Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distro it is difficult to guess which theme will be used by the user and what is really the "default" one. With such customization we don't even know which theme developers are using to develop the app. Look at Eclipse docs, there are different GTK themes used:

https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.22/jdt.php

https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.22/pde.php

Given that current theming doesn't really work I think that developers and distributions should at least try to use this new model of enforced theme. If it doesn't work than it can always be reverted.

[ssokolow]

Given that current theming doesn't really work

Citation needed.

People: “Linux needs a standard theme and none of all those distro rebrands and non-working 3rd-party skins!!!”
Also people: “I don't like the standard theme. Linux needs more customization options!!!”

Who are these people?</seinfeld>

(Seriously, though. I've never understood the "Linux needs a standard theme" people, and I've written applications using GTK+ 2.x and Qt. Worst case, test on whatever KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQt treat as their official default and call it a day.)

EFL? Not sure if that's a good idea. I mean: I like EFL and Enlightenment, but the vast majority of Phoronix members will avoid Solus like the plague now as they hate EFL and Enlightenment.

You're not wrong.

[lumks]

So how does developers know if they should write their app in plain GTK or also use libadwaita?

Depends on what they want. If they want a "just working design", where they can focus on features it's libadwaita. If they want a more flexible, user-themeable app or a different hardcoded style, it's pure GTK.