Fedora Workstation 39 Planning To Drop Custom Qt Theming

[jacob]

I'm sure that it's an unpopular opinion here, but restricting theming in general and marginalising Qt sound like two excellent decisions to me.

[patrick1946]

I really hope they can upstream the decoration support. I really started to like client side decorations with fire fox. I don't care so much about the theming. It is broken anyway most of the time.

[andyprough]

Red Hat always, ALWAYS ALWAYS pushes patches (that are acceptable upstream) upstream.

Sounds like it could get kind of "burdensome".

The only thing that may be behind a paywall is the version of a patch that has already been upstreamed, or released in the open that is then backported - and even then those are mostly available, but you have to read carefully.

How very free-software(ish).

[You-]

Next year's headline: Fedora to stop upstreaming support patches for Qt5, Qt6, cites developer blog post about it being "too burdensome"; Puts sources behind paywall, citing KDE community's "leeches" and "freeloaders".

For a moment there I thought you had been serious and not a troll. My mistake.

oh and Red Hat always, ALWAYS ALWAYS pushes patches (that are acceptable upstream) upstream. The only thing that may be behind a paywall is the version of a patch that has already been upstreamed, or released in the open that is then backported - and even then those are mostly available, but you have to read carefully.

[andyprough]

This is unlinked to other stuff. TLDR: these changes are developer lead.

Around February/March time there was major concern about adwaita-qt and Qgnome platform for a number of reasons which lead to a blog post explaining the various components.

These were mainly written for gnome but it didn't fit with gnome developers' philosphy ("dont force platofrm themes that are not those used and tested by the developers").

On the other hand Qt Developers DID expect desktops to theme their apps and add integrations, however this mostly meant that most apps were only tested with Breeze and broken elsewhere. OBS on the other hand was tested with the default Qt theme (and may have been broken with breeze).

So there was a lot of back and Forth where Jan (employed by Red Hat/IBM) WANTED to continue with the approach, update to Qt6 but other gnome and Fedora developers did not want that. It was however too late to change anything for Fedora 38.

Now he has come to a new plan with upstreaming as much support as possible in the still developed Qt6 along with a set of patches that may be carried by downstream Qt5 which are meant to follow the theme the app has been tested with with but with less changes.

Next year's headline: Fedora to stop upstreaming support patches for Qt5, Qt6, cites developer blog post about it being "too burdensome"; Puts sources behind paywall, citing KDE community's "leeches" and "freeloaders".

[You-]

A lot of stuff sure did get burdensome after the sale to IBM. Oddly enough.

This is unlinked to other stuff. TLDR: these changes are developer lead.

Around February/March time there was major concern about adwaita-qt and Qgnome platform for a number of reasons which lead to a blog post explaining the various components.

These were mainly written for gnome but it didn't fit with gnome developers' philosphy ("dont force platofrm themes that are not those used and tested by the developers").

On the other hand Qt Developers DID expect desktops to theme their apps and add integrations, however this mostly meant that most apps were only tested with Breeze and broken elsewhere. OBS on the other hand was tested with the default Qt theme (and may have been broken with breeze).

So there was a lot of back and Forth where Jan (employed by Red Hat/IBM) WANTED to continue with the approach, update to Qt6 but other gnome and Fedora developers did not want that. It was however too late to change anything for Fedora 38.

Now he has come to a new plan with upstreaming as much support as possible in the still developed Qt6 along with a set of patches that may be carried by downstream Qt5 which are meant to follow the theme the app has been tested with with but with less changes.

[fitzie]

Strong agree. Plus I was shown some screenshots of some NASA and CERN workstations by an old colleague where it was all a mishmash of toolkits (from golden oldies like Xaw, Motif to more recent (back then) like Gtk2) and it looked really cool in its own right!

The consistent Metro/OSX approach just looks to me like a lame home PC where the companies involved are focusing on appeasing consumers with eye candy rather than making interesting software.

I also agree. In fact, because electron apps are so common, I think it's quite dated to make an app look like the system widgets. Also I use browser themes to distinguish the multiple browsers I have open so I can find them easier so consistency is pretty much gone. I would like be able to customize an esthetic for my desktop, but these days, it's just some default apps and a background image. Not like the old days of fvwm where you had real control over the desktop.

[kpedersen]

I used to care about my apps looking uniformly, then I grew up and realized it doesn't really matter and my energy was better spent elsewhere

Strong agree. Plus I was shown some screenshots of some NASA and CERN workstations by an old colleague where it was all a mishmash of toolkits (from golden oldies like Xaw, Motif to more recent (back then) like Gtk2) and it looked really cool in its own right!

The consistent Metro/OSX approach just looks to me like a lame home PC where the companies involved are focusing on appeasing consumers with eye candy rather than making interesting software.

[V1tol]

Why not just use breeze/breeze-dark, as that's the actual default for KDE, the premier user of QT?

Breeze is not just a simple theme - it uses lots of KDE (not Qt) specific frameworks below. That's the reason why even Plasma users don't have Breeze theme for Qt6 apps today. Adwaita-qt is also not a simple CSS theming - it has lots of C++ code there.

So basically Fedora team had to choose between:
1) continue supporting adwaita-qt
2) switch to breeze with unknown amount of work needed
3) just drop Qt theming support completely

It looks like Qt6 apps will be ugly under any DE until Plasma 6 will be launched.

[JEBjames]

Michael

Unclear wording...missing word?

"Instead the plan is to more closely upstream Qt defaults." maybe "Instead the plan is to more closely follow upstream Qt defaults."