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

[caligula]

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

It's still not a first class citizen. They have to adapt to each change in gtk.

[mether]

Functionality that they don't want/use in GNOME Shell itself has repeatedly been removed specifically BECAUSE it was allowing other DEs to deviate from the GNOME "vision" of what a UI should be.

This claim doesn't make much sense because GNOME Shell (and Mutter) itself doesn't use GTK. It uses ST which is a layer over Clutter.

https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#overview

[ssokolow]

Citation? It is my experience. I have upgraded Ubuntu from one version to another and suddenly Libre Office Icons disappeared and I had to change the icons theme...

I googled a bit and it looks like I'm not the only one impacted by such behaviour: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1283...-icons-kubuntu

That's a LibreOffice bug through and through.

The spec for icon theming explicitly says that, if you use icons that aren't part of the set defined in the XDG Icon Naming Specification, you're supposed to install your preferred fallbacks into a special icon theme named hicolor, which the lookup must fall back to, similar to fallback when looking up font glyphs.

APIs in toolkits like Qt and GTK provide an argument to the "get icon" method for a bundled icon to be used when the system comes up empty. It's primarily intended for Windows and macOS, but also applies in this case.

That's two different points at which LibreOffice could have recovered if they'd been using things as intended.

I'm not against theming - I think that having single, decent and agreed reference (set of reference themes) wouldn't hurt - like Android, iOS, Windows.
What is sad is that most of the successful apps I use have their own themes: Firefox, IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code, Spotify and Chrome.

Granted, four of those are Chrome/Electron and Firefox, and the fifth is Java... all of which leaned hard on a "Look the same on all platforms, no matter how disharmonious with the rest of the platform it turns out to be" philosophy.

I also think that Gnome should be able to manage their own brand and if others want to customize it beyond what Gnome allows they should fork/rename it and don't call it Gnome - my view as well. If distribution has resources to do QA of each application with different theme I also don't see why it shouldn't be allowed to do so. However if they change app design then I guess they should change its name as well...

gcalc -> ubuntucalc

My main problem with it is that they spent over a decade building up the expectation that people could rely on GTK as a universal platform for Linux application development and now they're doubling down on "You don't want to follow along with GNOME? Tough luck. We're not gonna maintain the level of support we used to for use-cases outside our vision, and we're not gonna pay to have your application ported to something else either."

That's why you see so much grumbling as more and more people bite the bullet and swallow the cost of finding and migrating their efforts to alternatives to GTK and GNOME. (As I've mentioned before, LXDE/LXQt, Audacious, Subsurface, Solus, Budgie, etc.)

[ssokolow]

By we, you mean you who choose to post on a topic you care less and yet think the world evolved around your view. Strongly suggest to full read the details about libadwaita without your own bias and with an open minded approach. Until then, avoid posting when you have nothing to contribute.

I'm a programmer who switched away from GTK because it's becoming increasingly less "the toolkit you can use to target all DEs and expect it to be already installed".

I'm a user who spent years on LXDE after KDE 4.0 dropped the ball and switched away from GTK apps as GTK 3.x started to push more and more GNOME 3.x-isms, even onto non-GNOME apps.

As either, I came to Linux for its customizability when I got fed up with beating Windows XP into shape.

Which of these isn't relevant?

[grung]

Citation needed.

Citation? It is my experience. I have upgraded Ubuntu from one version to another and suddenly Libre Office Icons disappeared and I had to change the icons theme...

I googled a bit and it looks like I'm not the only one impacted by such behaviour: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1283...-icons-kubuntu

I'm not against theming - I think that having single, decent and agreed reference (set of reference themes) wouldn't hurt - like Android, iOS, Windows.
What is sad is that most of the successful apps I use have their own themes: Firefox, IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code, Spotify and Chrome.

I also think that Gnome should be able to manage their own brand and if others want to customize it beyond what Gnome allows they should fork/rename it and don't call it Gnome - my view as well. If distribution has resources to do QA of each application with different theme I also don't see why it shouldn't be allowed to do so. However if they change app design then I guess they should change its name as well...

gcalc -> ubuntucalc

[finalzone]

Why else would we deal with all the warts and papercuts on Linux when we could just be running Windows (which we probably already have an OEM license for) or macOS (which is "UNIX, but friendly")?

By we, you mean you who choose to post on a topic you care less and yet think the world evolved around your view. Strongly suggest to full read the details about libadwaita without your own bias and with an open minded approach. Until then, avoid posting when you have nothing to contribute.

[Mr.Elendig]

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 ?!?!

Literally uncustomizable

[ssokolow]

Ahh so thats what 'everyone' wants really? So people currently on Windows or macOS aren't using Linux because they can't customize their DE enough? Hmm I wonder what Microsoft or Apple are doing so well that allows those people to totally customize their DE experience. Oh, yeah nothing because you don't in Windows and macOS. So this is a bunch of nonsense.

Why else would we deal with all the warts and papercuts on Linux when we could just be running Windows (which we probably already have an OEM license for) or macOS (which is "UNIX, but friendly")?

Your straw man "So people currently on Windows or macOS aren't using Linux because they can't customize their DE enough?" argument is functionally equivalent to "So people currently on iPads aren't using GNOME because it's too customizable?".

(Spoiler alert: Alienating your existing demographic in hopes of appealing to another that are already comfortable on a competitor is generally a dumb strategy.)

[Debunez]

Both distros and users want theming.
Gnome devs should make it easier to theme and not just complicate it further and force down their terrible theme to everyone through recoloring. Once again, they didn´t , and are going against what everyone wants.

Ahh so thats what 'everyone' wants really? So people currently on Windows or macOS aren't using Linux because they can't customize their DE enough? Hmm I wonder what Microsoft or Apple are doing so well that allows those people to totally customize their DE experience. Oh, yeah nothing because you don't in Windows and macOS. So this is a bunch of nonsense.

You know what people do want? To be able to boot into their OS, install apps without friction, and have all their hardware devices work. I would say there has been major strides in Linux just this past year related to this, especially with Pipewire (another shoutout to Fedora doing it right).

Stop spreading this absolute horse shite saying the majority of people who use computers will only use a Linux DE if they can customize how their buttons or shell look. Its beyond nonsense and if it were true, Valve would have been pouring their engineering efforts into writing stylesheets or coloring API's instead of things that matter like runtime compatibility layers or drivers.

[Mez']

Both distros and users want theming.
Nobody cares about recoloring the ugliest of themes that adwaita is. You can plaster a wooden leg all you want...
Solus devs will both drop Gnome support in Solus and GTK in Budgie while we all know how Gnome closed-mindedness made it mandatory for Pop!_OS to lead their vision (the one Gnome lacks) elsewhere.
Solus will just leave the Gnome spin vanilla to avoid any issue, and vanilla being ugly and against what the users expect of a workflow, it's going to lose momentum. Not everyone is a Fedora cultist.
Distros want theming for branding and to give a nice and modern feel (that adwaita lacks) to their UI. And as users, we want to pick, and theming is part of what attracted us to Linux in the first place.
Gnome devs should make it easier to theme and not just complicate it further and force down their terrible theme to everyone through recoloring. Once again, they didn´t listen, and are going against what everyone wants.
They´re fragmenting Linux desktops once again, as these kind of dumb moves force others to leave the monolithic block that Gnome is. It started with Unity and now Solus and System76 have no other choice either if they want to materialize their own vision.
Let´s hope they deliver, we really need another strong counterweight (beside KDE) to give us solid workflows with more focus on covering the variety of user workflows and customizations.