[LocutusOfBorges]

This seems to quite deliberately miss the point of why so many find the effect libadwaita has had on the desktop experience to be so frustrating.

Really, it doesn’t matter whether the underlying motivations were supposedly to create a cleaner separation between projects at the abstract level - the consequences have been to introduce a situation where, for the first time in quite a long period, large swathes of significant, widely-used programs are no longer capable of fitting in on non-GNOME desktops.

That decision was theirs to make, and they were entirely free to do so - but squirming around the point to avoid talking about responsibility for the actual consequences of the decision re further fracturing the Linux desktop ecosystem is absurd.

[NekkoDroid]

> the consequences have been to introduce a situation where, for the first time in quite a long period, large swathes of significant, widely-used programs are no longer capable of fitting in on non-GNOME desktops.

I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop. Like, not matter how much you theme, the UX is going to be different and that can't really be changed without rewriting the entire app in a different toolkit with the target UX in mind.

GNOME and KDE UX are completely different. One gives you the bare necessaties of options mostly behind a hamburger menu and a nice amount of padding, while the other throws every option and the kitchen sink at you with a relativly high dencity of content. They target different people, which is fine as no size fits all.

[simion314]

>I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop.

Qt does the work to integrate with Windows and OSX, by this I do not mean that it paints the exact shame of border colors on the buttons but more deeper integration, like integrating with the native System Tray, desktop APIs, the correct order of OK/Cancel buttons.

For linux the Qt devs are aware that each distribution has it's own colors,, fonts and crap so it would be a waste to target only a distro say Red Hat.

KDE did the work to make GTK apps integrate as much as possible but I think GNOME did zero work to integrate Qt or KDE apps and they tried sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration.

I am not that type of user that needs all apps to have the exact same buttons otherwise my brain segfaults, I use KDE apps, GTK apps, Java apps, Electron apps. What I want from this apps is to use same Open File Dialogs and not be like GTK where the native GTK file picker has a weird sorting option for files and folders that do not match any other popular and sane system.

Also I remember GNOME guys claiming that you do not need thumbnails in the File Picker, that you are doing it wrong and the reality was that it was not easy to add the feature so they preferred to push that excuse that you are doing it wrong.

[guerrilla]

Yeah, but now there are three, not just two. GTK, GNOME and Qt, rather than just Qt and GTK.

[Cu3PO42]

It is relatively easy to patch libadwaita to apply non-Adwaita themes. On the AUR, there's libadwaita-without-adwaita. I have applied the same patch on NixOS. It works just about as well as theming does in standard Gtk3 or 4. No complaints really.

[red_admiral]

I know, but that still leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

On Windows, the first thing I do after setting up a new PC is disable the adware, uninstall default apps, turn off as much telemetry as I can, and very soon that'll include turning off the creepy AI too. They say I should use linux instead ...

And on a standard gnome/GTK/adwaita setup, apparently the first thing you have to do is patch the UI library to remove the hardcoded default theme. The free software world wasn't meant to be like this, where you have to fight the OS/distro to get things to work the way you want.

(Meanwhile Mint, as the original article alluded to, is still trying to do good by its users. Long may this continue.)

[jrm4]

I find the attempt to define "design language" amusing -- feels like if you have to devote that many words to what you're trying to do with design you've already failed hard.

[tristan957]

Every successful OS or application has a design language. All Microsoft Office applications look similar because they all use the same design language. Why do you diminish what you don't understand?