In Road To Qt, Audacious Switches From GTK3 Back To GTK2

[TheBlackCat]

What's this now? I need more information.

Read the bug report starting here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687752#c9

Basically, they only bothered to talk to the theme developers that have close connections with the gnome developers. It isn't that they don't support themes, they just don't support themes by people who don't have close ties to the core gtk+ developers.

[psychoticmeow]

This is not a problem with communication. gtk+ devs have communicated their goals and approach quite effectively. The problem is that many people do not agree with those goals or approach.

So you say, however I and others disagree. People were being caught out by changes to Gtk breaking things because they did not know that changes were being made.

No, sorry, you can't just dismiss any decision that disagrees with what Gnome devs want as "making their community members suffer". Gnome devs are not all-knowing, perfect beings that make perfect software no one can possibly improve on. This is exactly the attitude

What? I didn't dismiss anything, you said:

3. No matter how hard they try, they are not going to have a "uniform presentation". Distros will just patch their own stuff in no matter what gtk+ does. The only people who suffer are community members.

And my point was that I'm not sure how exactly its the fault of Gnome if a distro chooses to break things. Perhaps I'm missing your meaning?

Where did any of that appear in the blog post you were responding to? I never commented on your response to Luke, I commented on your response to the blog post. If there is false information in the blog post that you dismissed as "FUD" and "horse shit", I would like you to point it out. But you can't dismiss a blog post as "FUD" and "horse shit" based on something said 2 year later by someone completely unrelated on unrelated website.

You can start by explaining what, specifically, about the blog post is "FUD" and "horse shit" besides the awful crime of disagreeing with gnome developers.

Fair enough, I could've sworn you were replying to my response to of both these things. As for FUD, how about this:

The blog quotes Allan Day as saying:

I?m particularly surprised by the inclusion of themes. It seems bizarre...

As a way of demonstrating that the author thinks the Gnome developers don't want themes, which is completely out of context of the original discussion. Here's that paragraph in full:

I'm particularly surprised by the inclusion of themes. It seems bizarre
that we specifically designed the GNOME 3 control center not to include
theme installation/selection and then to reintroduce that very same
functionality via extensions.

Basically the author poisons the well making it easier to paint what the Gnome developers are in a bad light later on.

I could go on, but the problem with bullshit is it takes four times as long to clean up the mess than it does to make it. I've already been writing this response for 25 minutes and I need to get back to work.

Read the bug report starting here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687752#c9

Basically, they only bothered to talk to the theme developers that have close connections with the gnome developers. It isn't that they don't support themes, they just don't support themes by people who don't have close ties to the core gtk+ developers.

So is the solution to this not better communication of what is changing ahead of time, and for developers to be more involved?

[TheBlackCat]

So you say, however I and others disagree. People were being caught out by changes to Gtk breaking things because they did not know that changes were being made.

No, people were caught out by changes to Gtk breaking things because things broke repeatedly. Knowing that they were going to break didn't help that. In fact, it was knowing that the breakage would continue that led theme developers to stop developing themes at all. Which, from what gtk+ devs have said, is the way they prefer it.

And my point was that I'm not sure how exactly its the fault of Gnome if a distro chooses to break things. Perhaps I'm missing your meaning?

Yes you are. My point is that things don't break on distros, at least not major ones. They have the resources to work around Gnome's decisions. What breaks are the individual content creators.

As a way of demonstrating that the author thinks the Gnome developers don't want themes, which is completely out of context of the original discussion.

Wait, so the FUD is the claim Gnome developers don't want themes, but the full context is that Gnome developers don't want themes and are upset that people have made it easier than they would like to change themes? Even if it is out of context, the context doesn't change the message that Gnome developers don't want themes.

So is the solution to this not better communication of what is changing ahead of time, and for developers to be more involved?

The solution is not to break things, and not to consider third-party developers as enemies.

[psychoticmeow]

No, people were caught out by changes to Gtk breaking things because things broke repeatedly. Knowing that they were going to break didn't help that. In fact, it was knowing that the breakage would continue that led theme developers to stop developing themes at all. Which, from what gtk+ devs have said, is the way they prefer it.

Where have they said that they prefer it that way? I've seen developers say that they don't have the resources to do better at that time.

Yes you are. My point is that things don't break on distros, at least not major ones. They have the resources to work around Gnome's decisions. What breaks are the individual content creators.

That makes sense, I really wasn't sure what you where trying to say.

Wait, so the FUD is the claim Gnome developers don't want themes, but the full context is that Gnome developers don't want themes and are upset that people have made it easier than they would like to change themes? Even if it is out of context, the context doesn't change the message that Gnome developers don't want themes.

The quote from that blog article was from a paragraph where Allan expressed confusion as to why they would remove these from the core configuration utility and put them on a website. Allan even lists reasons why he thinks extensions should be kept:

There are many possible roles for extensions and I am not saying they
shouldn't be supported at all. They are valuable as a crutch for our
traditional users who are upgrading from GNOME 2, for instance, and they
are an excellent facility for developing, testing and experimenting with
functionality that may eventually get folded into shell proper.

This seems to be the exact opposite attitude that the author of that blog accuses Allan of holding.

The solution is not to break things, and not to consider third-party developers as enemies.

Gnome developers don't treat third party contributors as enemies, they simply lack the time and resources to make sure they don't break things for third parties, this is expressed in the BugZilla comment you linked to earlier...

That said, have things not gotten a whole lot better as the platform stabilises? A lot of these complaints are from fairly early and fairly unstable releases after all. Any more recent technical bug reports about breakage would be much appreciated.

[Luke]

filechooser sidebar icons do not change for ANY theme I have tried

You're damn right.

How are these any more hardcoded than other icons? If your theme doesn't provide the necessary icon file then it'll fall back to using those from Adwaita/the default. And what's this now about extensions breaking with every release? Gnome shell extensions, or something Gtk related?

Not only does no theme have change them, I looked in Adwaita and could not find any icons specific to the filechooser sidebar! If you know of any, please say what they are called, I want those monochrome icons OUT of my system and uninstalled several GNOME apps because of them.

I have the absolute right to decide for myself what goes in my system, GNOME has no right to whine if I change what they published for my own use or switch to something like MATE. This is FOSS, not Microsoft-style proprietary licensed software, so there is no shrink-wrapped EULA saying I can't roll back or modify GTK,

[psychoticmeow]

Not only does no theme have change them, I looked in Adwaita and could not find any icons specific to the filechooser sidebar! If you know of any, please say what they are called, I want those monochrome icons OUT of my system and uninstalled several GNOME apps because of them.

They are just normal stock icons, on Arch Linux you can find some of them under /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/ for example, I think all 'actions' icons are monochrome, so you can probably just create symlinks from your themes colour icons. If you need help with the matter, let me know.

Edit: Actually everything under /usr/share/icons/gnome should be monochrome and suffixed with '-symbolic'.

I have the absolute right to decide for myself what goes in my system, GNOME has no right to whine if I change what they published for my own use or switch to something like MATE. This is FOSS, not Microsoft-style proprietary licensed software, so there is no shrink-wrapped EULA saying I can't roll back or modify GTK,

Gnome whining because you do something on your own system? Yeah, no, not going to happen.

[Luke]

I checked the GNOME icons, could not find the black and white sidebar icons

They are just normal stock icons, on Arch Linux you can find some of them under /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/ for example, I think all 'actions' icons are monochrome, so you can probably just create symlinks from your themes colour icons. If you need help with the matter, let me know.

Edit: Actually everything under /usr/share/icons/gnome should be monochrome and suffixed with '-symbolic'.

Those icons are grey and white, not black and white like the filechooser sidebar icons. They also do not include folder or device icons. I looked in places and and in devices under scaleable, in fact the whole default GNOME icon theme seems to consistantly use grey and white, not black and white icons.

I could not find those black and white folder and device icons anywhere in /usr/share/icons/gnome in Ubuntu, I doubt these would differ much from distro to distro. I looked again today, could not find them anywhere. I figured they were hardcoded into the theme because I could not find them in any icon folder.

The GTK theme for color layout is something I DID manage to theme, thankfully themes written against early versions of GTK3 are portable to later versions by acting on warnings given when opening something like gedit from terminal. The current file arrangement within Adwaita where the whole CSS file is @import url("resource:///org/gnome/adwaita/gtk-main.css") didn't give me any clues as to where the actual CSS file is, thankfully my port based on the first Adwaita GTKtheme did not use that system and still works today. It looks very close to the UbuntuStudio GTK2 theme, save that I changed one color in both from blue to a a blue-green I like. The GTK3 and GTK2 versions are very close-except for those filechooser sidebar icons. Thankfully Nemo doesn't use them in its sidebar.

I can't post a screenshot here, to see what I am talking about open gedit, then go to file >open and bring up the filechooser. The sidebar on the left has black and white icons (at least in Ubuntu it does). Any help on finding those icons if they are in a theme is greatly appreciated!

[psychoticmeow]

Those icons are grey and white, not black and white like the filechooser sidebar icons. They also do not include folder or device icons. I looked in places and and in devices under scaleable, in fact the whole default GNOME icon theme seems to consistantly use grey and white, not black and white icons.

I could not find those black and white folder and device icons anywhere in /usr/share/icons/gnome in Ubuntu, I doubt these would differ much from distro to distro. I looked again today, could not find them anywhere. I figured they were hardcoded into the theme because I could not find them in any icon folder.

The GTK theme for color layout is something I DID manage to theme, thankfully themes written against early versions of GTK3 are portable to later versions by acting on warnings given when opening something like gedit from terminal. The current file arrangement within Adwaita where the whole CSS file is @import url("resource:///org/gnome/adwaita/gtk-main.css") didn't give me any clues as to where the actual CSS file is, thankfully my port based on the first Adwaita GTKtheme did not use that system and still works today. It looks very close to the UbuntuStudio GTK2 theme, save that I changed one color in both from blue to a a blue-green I like. The GTK3 and GTK2 versions are very close-except for those filechooser sidebar icons. Thankfully Nemo doesn't use them in its sidebar.

I can't post a screenshot here, to see what I am talking about open gedit, then go to file >open and bring up the filechooser. The sidebar on the left has black and white icons (at least in Ubuntu it does). Any help on finding those icons if they are in a theme is greatly appreciated!

On my system the icons are in that directory, the hard drive icon for example is: /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/devices/drive-harddisk-symbolic.svg. I think the icon colouring is actually dynamic based on the theme, which is why these are svg files, so CSS can be applied, you'll probably have to replace them with SVGs.

[anda_skoa]

The fact is that Qt has its own set of costs: you must use C++ (which not everybody likes), and it uses a very strange C++ preprocessor at that.

The C++ preprozessor might be a weird thing, i.e. newer languages like Java, Python, Go, etc. don't need one. It is a legacy from C.
And it is not that difficult to get used to

Cheers,
_

[Luke]

OK, the device icons changed for the Hicolor and Oxygen themes

On my system the icons are in that directory, the hard drive icon for example is: /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/devices/drive-harddisk-symbolic.svg. I think the icon colouring is actually dynamic based on the theme, which is why these are svg files, so CSS can be applied, you'll probably have to replace them with SVGs.

The device icons changed for the Hicolor and Oxygen themes, the folder icons stayed the same. When the filechooser is not the active window, all if it is made grayer, including the icons.

I found the icons you describe-all of them in light gray. I'll see what happens if I add icons under those filenames in my own theme.