If you’ve been paying attention to recent chatter in the GNOME and surrounding communities, you may have noticed there’s a lot of disgruntled developers within certain communities that rely on parts of the GNOME stack, such as Pop!_OS and Budgie. I’ve been trying to follow most of these discussions and have been itching to write about it, but with the discussions still ongoing and my own lack of knowledge on the intricacies of the interplay between distribution maintainers, desktop environment developers, application programmers, and GNOME itself, I figured I should stay away from it until someone with more knowledge stepped in.
Well, thanks to Joshua Strobl, experience lead of Solus and one of the main developers of Budgie, I now have a great in-depth story to link to. I urge you to read the whole article, but here’s Strobl’s conclusions:
1. GTK4 has not met our expectations since its release in December of 2020, nor have we been satisfied with its state as of the writing of this post.
2. Current plans by GNOME for changes to how theming works is viewed as regressive for desktop Linux, developers, and user choice.
3. We do not believe that GNOME is treating its community, from individual users to entire operating systems, in a manner that is equitable and respectful of their choice on how they want to curate their own experience.
4. Budgie 11 will not be written in GTK4.
5. For Budgie Edition: we will be working on replacing software developed by GNOME with that of alternative software developers as well as “in-house” solutions. These will not necessarily be under the GetSolus organization nor will they be associated with Budgie. Adopting Budgie going forward (at least until 11, when we have our own control center) does not and will not require using our own apps. This has even remained true even for Budgie Desktop View, we support alternatives like Desktop Folder as alternative “desktop” implementations in Budgie.
6. GNOME Edition will be demoted to a non-curated edition and moved to a lesser position on our Downloads page in a future release of Solus.
There are various problems non-GNOME GTK developers are running into, but as a user, my biggest problem is GNOME’s adoption of libadwaita. GNOME is going to ship a library, libadwaita, that when used by an application, will force it to use the default light Adwaita theme, with no option to change it to dark mode or a different theme. The end result is that if you use GNOME, you’re going to start seeing applications – both from GNOME itself as well as from third parties – that do not respect your choice of GTK theme, and instead always default to light Adwaita.
But of course, this problem extends beyond GNOME itself, as other popular GTK desktops, such as MATE, Cinnamon, and Budgie, also make use of both GTK applications, as well as components and applications from GNOME. On top of that, countless popular distributions, such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS, all use custom themes. Their desktops will be severely broken since GNOME and GTK applications will no longer use their custom themes.
As a result, Solus and Budgie will start transitioning to using EFL instead of GTK for various components, which is a pretty big shift. As far as I know, other distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Pop!_OS, have not made any plans yet as to how to handle this new reality, but I would assume they, too, will start to replace any offending applications and components, or hack GTK altogether as a workaround.
This is a shitty situation, and the GNOME developers are causing a lot of bad blood and rifts here that really could have been avoided. Theming and customisation are a core aspect of the Linux desktop, and breaking it like this is going to make a lot of non-GNOME developers as well as users very, very unhappy.
I mourn for the wasted effort and difficulties surrounding this. Straightforward widget sets with theming features were the dream of the 90’s, and we had them for a time. So much careful user interface research from the early days of computing seems to be wasted now that apps contend for user attention via interface design. Are people really just taken by the “shiny”? Just make it so useful that I pick the thing for practical reasons…
FortranMan,
I feel the same way. UI designers did a great job perfecting UIs and establishing best practices in the late 90s and we stuck with it for some time. But nothing lasts forever and a lot of those best practices went out the window. Windows 8 introduced some major UI regressions on the windows side, and gnome is doing it on the linux side. I just hate seeing things that had been optimized years ago being thrown away.
Everyone’s got a different opinion about it though. While I don’t begrudge those who like changing things up…the problem is they’re stepping on the toes of those who don’t. I don’t like the idea of forking things, but in practical terms if they’re continuously unwilling to accommodate the needs of others, then distros may have to come up with a solution on their own without gnome. I’d much rather that everyone could find a middle ground, but sometimes that’s not possible if a party is completely unwilling to make any concessions.
I haven’t paid much attention to it recently (been out of the linux desktop world for a while) but wasn’t the point of KDE’s Plasma to give people the tools to build whatever crazy desktop system they wanted, from a mac-style top menu bar to a Windows style taskbar to old Unix style docks, and theme it all however they liked?
How much of that survived till now?
The1stImmortal
Yes, I would say KDE Plasma still has a lot of the look and feel of a mature 90s desktop, and incidentally it’s the desktop I’m using right now haha. I have custom toolbars with app launchers on them. You can also use the more modern meta-key+type name of application to launch. I think it’s mostly intuitive and works the way I like it to. I also think xfce is pretty neat. Some people may prefer gnome and I don’t see a reason for people to fight over things like this. But I do find it unfortunate that gnome developers are negatively influencing GTK applications for other desktops though. I wish everyone could work together, but Gnome may not be interested in finding a common ground. It leaves other projects in a tough spot.
I’m on KDE too. I didn’t want to start a desktop environment war so I didn’t bring it up, but I do like the configuration options KDE gives me.
@Alfman
I’m so stuck in the 90s that I compile the qt5 branch of the Skulpture widget theme and use it on Plasma 5 lol
https://store.kde.org/p/1005535/
IIRC It was Thom who turned me on to this here on osnews many years ago.
Edit: Yes it was. https://www.osnews.com/story/26651/ode-to-skulpture/
Cheers Thom! 🙂
Obviously you are not alone with this sentiment about 90’s desktop widgets. Personally I have long written off Gnome as a lost cause and later on also GTK. Recently I see a ray of hope in SerenityOS to save us from this mess and give us a free OS we can actually respect.
You
This rant is reminiscent of the previous misinformed outcries that Gnome has faced eversince Gnome 3.0 was launched. Somehow Gnome 3 is still so controversial that any new change will trigger a lot of people and cause a lot of pointless whine. Surely enough I bought into that before as well.
I’m pretty sure that libadwaita (pay attention to spelling) will gain back the dark theme support if it’s missing right now. Gnome folks are probably writing the code for the “standard edition” of the desktop first and people into customization get their way later.
Yes, my understanding is that they were open to dark theme support being added later, but they were not open to allowing the gtk theme a user had selected. There was some discussion of how a gtk theme isn’t a gnome theme, and libadaita is a gnome library, not a gtk library so it should respect gnome’s themes, and other discussions of how some gtk themes create lots of problems for various apps. I’m sympathetic to their position, to an extent. I hate themes. Always have. Like design it right, and I’ll use it. I don’t appreciate any effort put into theming. I’m a kill joy in that manner. I just want stuff to work. I don’t care if it doesn’t match other things I like or my favorite colors. Gnome is a Desktop I turn to when everything else is just awfully broken, and it always just works.
I’m still not convinced that libadwaita is going to kill theming altogether, but I also do not follow the internal discussions on Gnome boards. There seems to be a transition to decouple “GTK” and “Gnome” from each other and that also seems to involve the theming functionality. Theming isn’t being blocked, it’s just moving to another place. Therefore it should be possible to write code that will allow custom themes.
It’s just the same shit that’s going on with transitioning to Wayland too — familiar settings keep disappearing because there’s no centralized configuration anymore but instead everything needs to be implemented in “platform libraries”.
I don’t know I’ve only loosely followed this, but several Gnome devs were like “Theming, we didn’t kill theming, Theming has never been supported by Gnome, that was GTK theming. And we previously didn’t block it, but we also didn’t support it. We are continuing in not supporting it. No change”
I don’t care about Gnome itself. I tried it, I didn’t like it, I am not using it. But it is not the first time Gnome project is damaging its host ecosystem. First they killed Gnome 2, which for a while was a de-facto Linux desktop – these were times we could go to a store and buy a Linux laptop, and I don’t mean one running ChromeOS. Then they started messing with libraries and services other projects depended on. Porting Xfce to Gtk3 is a good example – it took something like 20 sub-versions for Gtk3 to stabilise its APIs and as soon as it became usable they started talking about Gtk4 and deprecating stuff. This theming discussion is just one aspect of a broader trend. It just happens to be more visible to the users.
Gnome folks have no regard to development of Linux. They just want a niche Gnome OS and being in full control, even if that means cutting a branch they are sitting on. In a long term this is hurting themselves too (more people cared about Gnome 2 than Gnome 3) but, then, they have no regard to their users either.
I’m looking at the twitter posts referenced in Joshua Strobl’s article, and I can’t see how they could be interpreted as “threats and misleading statements”, at least not to a level to justify stonewalling them in the development process.
If they don’t want to deal with them, that’s their choice, but it should be a private one, not one as a maintainer of the platform.
@The1stImmortal:
I agree, it was basically just “If you don’t improve your software, you will lose users”. And because of this supposed “threat”, they decided not to improve the software…!?
I am not a Gnome developer. I was not at GUADEC in 2019 and I knew about the direction Gnome was taking, so Budgie certainly should have known by now (there bread and butter). System 76 was supposedly at the meeting!
In 2019, at GUADEC, there was a discussion between Gnome, Elementary, Ubuntu, System 76 and others about Adwaita, theming, color api, Dark and Contrast api, etc. This discussion in 2019 is what lead to the current development and design of libadwaita. After GUADEC, everyone went their separate ways. Everyone at the meeting who cared about theming were to contribute towards a theme api. At minimum to start the ball rolling, all Ubuntu, Budgie or System 76 needed to to do is produce a list of things they needed that were missing from libadwaita. No one who “needed” theming support did anything, so nothing got done.
Within this time Elementary and Gnome (who were both at the meeting) have worked together on a color api and Dark mode api. So it is rather clear that Gnome was serious about the direction of libadwaita discussed in 2019. What we have here, is a group of payed developers waiting until the 11 hour, and whine that Gnome will not do all the work for them.
I understand that Gnome has a history. But this time, this is not Gnome being a dick, this is Budige dropping the ball and crying about it. This is a group of payed developers being told well in advance what Gnome is going to do, and what Budgie et all need to do to get theming support in libadwaita started and doing nothing. So the theming api got stalled. Now Ubuntu, System 76 and Budgie are scrambling because they could not even be bothered to do the bare minimum two years ago.
We might see theming support, but it is now going to be a lot more work to get it into Gnome 42.
Also, I would take anything Budgie or Solus have to say on this matter. If I remember correctly, they were abandoning GTK for QT a few years ago.
This is real news. It’s too bad this comment is so far down.
Ubuntu is clownshoes, and System76 uses Ubuntu as their upstream.
As for Budgie/Solus, I’m not sure. They’re not doing anything particularly innovative or interesting. Cinnamon does the GTK Windows(TM) thing better, and ElementaryOS has a better looking desktop.
The whole situation is a unfortunate one indeed. Some people currently involved with GNOME 3 are extremists and it shows. On the same time GNOME is such big part of Linux ecosystem that you can’t simply ignore it altogether. Hate to say it but as for an analogy. Similar to situation in Afghanistan where Taliban took over and normal people have to deal with the consequences. To the best of their ability.
Likely a bit overdue already but the time has come we start treating GNOME as GNOME being hostile and abusive. The time is likely right and we should burst their bubble. If some people won’t agree then for such people best to leave the GNOME project altogether and to make their own project. To implement their ideas over there. Not to hold GNOME project as hostage of some extremist ideas any more.
Why am I not surprised? Pat saw the writing on the wall sixteen years ago when he removed GNOME from Slackware. Despite efforts by System76 and Ubuntu to make something usable and beautiful out of the clusterfuck that is GNOME 3, the GNOME project itself chooses to make life difficult for the very same distros that kept it afloat all these years.
Maybe System76 can adopt another desktop like Pantheon or Budgie, I think either of those would be a good fit for their distro.
Damn right about Pat Volkerding. Back then I used Slackware and I thought there were packaging problems of whatever. Currently I’m using Arch but sometimes I consider taking some Slack.
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64
The 15.0 RC is extremely polished, especially if you’re a fan of KDE Plasma. My only complaint about Slackware is the same as it’s always been since I started using it over 20 years ago: You’re expected to install the entire distro with all provided packages, and if you don’t you’ll run into dependency issues. This means keeping Xfce even if you use KDE, and vice versa. It’s possible to whittle down the individual packages to make a leaner installation that doesn’t have issues, but if you’re going to do that you may as well start with a minimalist distro like Void (tied with Slackware for my current favorite distro) and build up.
Lol, all these years always the same criticism on Gnome. Meanwhile loads of people are using it happily, while the group of people refusing to use it are very vocal on how bad it works for them?!
And regarding the leaders of the project; it seems they show leadership and don’t want to please everyone. Would Linux itself have come this far if its creator would have been more of a people person?
No that is not the case at all. Majority isn’t using GNOME happily. Where did you get that idea from? Just look at the fragmentation that happened after GNOME 3 and look at the number of Linux distributions that use stock GNOME. The reality is beyond some minority nobody is happily using GNOME. That is not a good leadership.
So… Arch, Debian and Fedora all use default GNOME. Probably the three largest distributions, and the basis for many others…
On Arch and Debian it’s up to the end user to choose the flavor or to decide what packages to install to get a DE. They don’t particularly care about that. I was talking more about the popular distribution where there is the official edition and it runs stock GNOME. Fedora yes. But for Fedora it would be a bit strange if that would not be the case. Due to the relationship in between Fedora and GNOME. And i am sure that on Fedora many users install extensions and themes to customize the experience of the stock GNOME. Such people hence can not be considered to be happy with the stock vision of GNOME. The vision GNOME people want to enforce. My claim hence still stands. Minority of people use stock GNOME and are happy with it.
Talk about missing the point. Sure, Arch and Debian and even Fedora (through downloading a different spin) give the user a choice. But you install GNOME, you get unaltered GNOME. Same with KDE. Ubuntu and it’s derivitaves seem to be the only ones to make major changes. I would have to check OpenSuse again, but seriously, doing the base install and letting the user choose which extensions to set up is much more user friendly than barfing your own setup on top of Gnome then if a user wants to use just gnome (I do. Only extensions I use are putting the top icons back (because some applications like Discord refuse to dump the tray and support the gnome dock thing.) And the vertical desktop… because yeah GNOME 40 making it horizontal like all the other crappy desktops is annoying…
@leech
On numerous occasions there was a blog post from the GNOME camp saying (some) don’t believe in theming and extensions at all. Hence if you do use a theme or an extension on GNOME. Then you don’t use GNOME in a way those people believe you should be using it. If you defend them and their actions then please uninstall all extensions, set the default theme and use stock GNOME. Otherwise don’t try to convince other people in something you don’t believe either.
testadura,
“Lol. all these years always the same criticism about chocolate ice cream. Meanwhile loads of people are eating it happily, while the group of people refusing to eat it are very vocal on how they don’t like it?!”
Obviously don’t take this too seriously, but I use it as an example to highlight the way people’s opinions are unique. You can’t use the fact that something is good for you to imply that it’s good for everyone else. Gnome 3 worked of course but at the same time I felt it was regressive for the way I am accustomed to working with WIMP interfaces. Did I make a huge deal about it? No I really didn’t, but blaming people for not liking chocolate ice cream is silly and I for one am glad there are other flavors like chocolate chip mint.
Sounds like you’re a trump supporter, haha. I actually do think that some of the negative personality traits have harmed linux’s reputation, although this is not unique to linux by any means.
I am curious what will RedHat do with the problem they have created/funded. I guess they get most of their money from servers but the desktop market is a mess. My former company is now upgrading to RHEL7 but only after they have moved desktops out of these machines. We used to run Gnome2 directly on CAD workstations (a few thousand users worldwide), now it is Gnome2 or Xfce on a couple dozens machines dedicated to remote desktops (*not* running RHEL) from which people ssh to workstations. The next step is realizing they don’t need RHEL at all. Software vendors used to require it but now they are more open to alternatives.
Interesting. Just curious, are you able to share what the CAD app and use case are/were?
A wild Theo de Raadt appears!
Jokes aside you could also blame linux popularity for many of its downsides, going mainstream means dumbing down things a lot.
After a decade i feel that it’s safe to say GNOME 3 didn’t made Linux more mainstream. More likely it’s holding back further adoption. It’s a shame they are unable to realize that and to change course.
Geck – exactly.
According to numerous polls to this date most people use KDE. Gnome is a distant second.
This is an excellent example of why the fact that Linux doesn’t have a single desktop is a *strength,* not a weakness. Sure, in an alternate universe maybe everyone who uses Linux uses KDE, or Cinnamon, or MATE; and maybe as a result Linux has a greater market share than Mac, but if you’re going for counterfactuals and/or alternate universes, maybe there’s one where Linux is proprietary and Windows is open source.
I realise that it would be egotistical to assume that GNOME developers do things just to cheese me off, but every decision they’ve made since transitioning to GNOME3 has, in my opinion, been a huge mistake. I can’t imagine an alternate universe where, all else being equal, I’d use Linux, if my only desktop choice was GNOME3/4x
The Gnome folks (especially 3+) keep going through bursts of favoring their arbitrary HIG (human interface guidelines) instead of listening to actual user feedback.
They made a bunch of good calls over the years, (the slap the corner for a menu thing was horrid at first, but grew on me).
However that bled over to a bunch of bad calls around themes, plugins, system tray (remember the “compatibility tray that would “pop out” from the bottom corner? ugh.), file manager (the delete hotkey is now ctl + del because we have users complaining about hitting delete accidentally. Bringing up the sane solution of a confirmation dialog resulted in the ticket being closed as will not fix because of HIG.)
tldr; new ideas should be embraced, however if you do something everyone *hates* for an extended period of time… maybe it’s time to reconsider. I think not supporting themes fall into this category. Sometimes something old is designed the way it is because of decades of refinement.
tldr; Questioning convention is good, but throwing out historical usability refinement “just because new@!!” is bad.
Yep. Very well said.
This whole article is a very one-sided view of the whole theming aspect of Gtk4 and libadwaita. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by all the hyberbole comments about the Gnome project and the developers involved, like this:
“This is a shitty situation, and the GNOME developers are causing a lot of bad blood and rifts here that really could have been avoided.”
For a more balanced view of what’s really going on (hint: it’s not some evil plot from upstream Gnome or gtk developers…), see this
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themeses
I especially like the following part:
“The process to theme your system might be a bit different compared to GTK 3 but it will still work. Likewise, if you are developing a distribution, you have control of the end product and can do anything you want with the code. There is a plethora of options available. Apparently complaining on social media and bullying volunteers into submission was one such option…”
Correct link should be
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes
I don’t know if it’s an evil plot or just a plot. But the fact is it’s a plot against traditional theming on Linux. There is a real desire, by some, to hinder theming support on GNOME. Things like hard coding most of the “look and feel” and to allow some lets say coloring support type of adjustments. And claiming because of that developers will more likely develop applications for Linux. What will happen in reality? There is a plethora of GUI toolkits for Linux and this will only cause further fragmentation in regards to “look and feel” on Linux. It’s like Elementary OS have their own HIG, GNOME has their own HIG … All feel their platform is special enough and people will develop apps only for their platform by following their HIG. The reality is most of the Linux apps end up using some widely used GUI tooolkit like Qt and minority of apps follow some HIG. Then you get a really great situation when GNOME calculator looks this way, VLC another way … Some of that was traditionally resolved by theming. But the way things are going now you won’t have much control over it anymore and will just have to accept that after all this additional user facing limitations introduced and all the talk about HIG and … The whole thing will end up being worse then it ever was. And people on the Internet will argue if you should or you should not use themes on Linux. And at the same time looking at the applications they run and feel, that as a whole. they are looking at a pile of garbage.
It is not the first time Gnome developers are causing problems, so the criticism is entirely warranted. Gnome keeps making radical changes and deprecating stuff other (non-Gnome) developers and users depend on. This would be fine for a niche experimental project few people use, but not a desktop environment that aspires to drive the development of Linux desktop. At very least Gnome should be very careful not to break other people’s stuff, that is not deprecating APIs in libraries and services for developers and not changing the UI for the users. Is it too much to expect from a mature software project? Seriously, Gnome devs often look like a bunch of kids trying demonstrate every new trick they have just learned.
“At very least Gnome should be very careful not to break other people’s stuff”
Nothing has been broken in gtk4. It’s just that custom theming does not work the same as in gtk3 for technical reasons. Downstream distributions are free to carry a custom libadwaita and take responsibility for their own theming. But it is unreasonable that an upstream gnome application should be responsible for bugs caused by downstream theming. Also this:
“And I guess this also needs to be stated: this change only affects apps that choose to use libadwaita and adopt the GNOME Design Guidelines, not “every” GTK 4 application.
As usual, the fact that the themes keep working doesn’t mean they are supported. The same issues about restyling applications when they don’t expect it apply and GNOME can not realistically support arbitrary stylesheets that none of the contributors develop against and test.”
Now please read the whole blog post thoroughly and then come back and tell me exactly what you don’t agree with. And please be specific instead of hand waving “gtk and gnome developers deliberately want to break theming and also make it impossible in the future”.
tomas40,
The blog post seems factually sound to me. But the problem is I don’t think it addresses the concerns of naysayers. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but consider the opposing point of view: why does one needs to fork libadwaita instead of having the official upstream libadwaita support theming?
If we apply the same logic to any other project “just create a custom fork” is rarely what users want to hear in response to a feature requests. It’s totally natural to argue over what’s in scope, but considering GTK’s raison d’être is rendering UIs I’m kind of sympathetic to the view that theming really should be in scope without requiring a fork. At the very least, it’s not a preposterous opinion to hold.
I don’t really know how widespread this will be in practice, are there any estimates of how many applications will be effected by the new libadwaita changes in gtk4? Given that gnome expects it to play a central role going forward, it seems logical to infer that they expect most GTK4 applications to use it.
That is not true even now. Gnome has already pushed a lot of its internal conventions and guidelines into Gtk3 (header bars in dialog boxes, icons, menu handling, removal of X11 stuff etc). Porting a 3rd party Gtk2 apps to Gtk3 was a constant fight trying to maneuver between API and L&F breakages.
There is zero chance Gtk4 will be free of Gnome interference. This theming is just one, relatively minor (but very visible to the public) example of Gnome EEE strategy. All things considered (I doubt these people will ever come to their senses) it would be much better to everyone if Gnome devs were denied commit access to Gtk/Gdk/Glib/etc and worked on their private forks instead.
ndrw,
That’s a very interesting point. The reason they don’t care is because they control GTK, but if the shoe were on the other foot and someone else controlled GTK, Gnome would be in the opposite position of having to create a fork. Under such a scenario it’s nearly certain that the Gnome devs would be the ones complaining about upstream limitations and lack of support.
Regardless, the fact is Gnome controls GTK, so the point is kind of mute. The trivial response is “if you don’t like it then don’t use it”, but obviously this ignores the network effects, which can be extremely strong and unavoidable. Me personally, I prefer when desktops don’t change or only very minor changes. This puts me at odds with most projects because no change is the antithesis of new releases, haha.
Well in fact you are wrong about gtk4 and the purpose of libadwaita:
https://aplazas.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/blog/2021/03/31/introducing-libadwaita.html
“Following these guidelines can be streamlined via a library offering tailored widgets and styles. This role has been filled by GTK because of its strong bonds with the GNOME project: Adwaita is both GNOME’s visual language and GTK’s default theme. This is somewhat problematic though, as GTK serves multiple audiences and platforms, and this favores GNOME over them… ”
Please read the whole blog post before commenting.
Especially the section”
Untangling them”
Also this:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-41-libadwaita
“Libadwaita aims to help unify GNOME applications and advance their human interface guidelines while still allowing GTK4 to advance and be used by developers independent of GNOME.”
So one of the reasons for libadwaita is precisely to adress the concerns you have over gtk3 and its strong connection to Gnome compared to gtk2.
I have read the entirety of linked Joshua’s blog post. It covers much more than the theming issues. I can only say it matches my experience and frustrations of porting applications to Gtk3, except that Gtk4 appears to have doubled down on all the self inflicted issues. In hindsight, the effort I’ve put in porting applications into Gtk3 would have taken me more than half the way into rewriting them in Qt and it would have resulted in more maintainable code now. I truly wonder what my successors will do now. If it was up to me I’d simply ignore Gtk4+.
Ok, good that you read the whole blog post.
Now you can also read this to have another view of the subject and then decide for yourself:
https://aplazas.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/blog/2021/03/31/introducing-libadwaita.html
It’s always good to have both sides of a story.
I’ve read this post as well, I just didn’t find it particularly interesting or relevant to comment on it.
As expected, the article presents a very Gnome-centric view of the issues with its ecosystem. It focuses exclusively on theming, which is one of the least important issues, all things considered. And even then, the proposed solution is sort of “we’ve realized you don’t like being punched in the face, how about hitting you in the stomach instead”.
How about developing the software stack everyone (including people outside Gnome) is happy about? Yes, that’s impossible. Gnome devs would have to behave like adults, listen to people and sometimes even implement things they don’t like (or at least not remove them). Outrageous!
The bottom line is: Gnome is destroying Gtk and other libraries in their software stack. For (non-Gnome) application developers this means it is the time to switch toolkits or at least not to port their code to newer versions of Gtk.