back to article GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

GNOME 42 is here, but its new look and feel doesn't yet include all of the environment. This is already causing rumblings of discontent. This release is significant because soon it will be the default desktop of the next Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. That means a lot of people will be looking at GNOME 42 every day …

  1. Alistair
    Windows

    I don't think there's very little you can do about it

    I've been KDE since....... KDE.

    There are at least 6 other WM's out there that I can think of OTTOMH.

    Mind you, I've been linux since *at least* Slackware 4.

    1. karlkarl Silver badge

      Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

      "I've been KDE since....... KDE."

      So you have experienced the KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2 competitive era (before KDE 4.x and Gnome 3).

      Would you honestly say that things have become better in terms of UI?

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

        What they said.

        KDE 1.x was fine. Looked boring, which is more or less what I want. Did the job.

        KDE 2 was ugly with fancy themes everywhere. Only Corel (and later Xandros, briefly) made it usable.

        KDE 3 was worse and Xandros had given up. (It's still around and still pushing releases, but nobody cares.) It boggles me that the Trinity folks bothered to fork it.

        KDE 4 was abominable, with the fantastic combination of being retina-searingly ugly *and* horrendously unusable with weird floating bean controls and pointless floating widgets... a graphic-design nightmare, plus a usability nightmare. Well *done*.

        I don't care for flat themes, but at least going flat meant KDE 5 didn't look as nightmarish, but it's over-fussy, clunky, poorly-customisable, and generally doesn't support anything except what the designers want.

        1. nematoad

          Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

          "It boggles me that the Trinity folks bothered to fork it."

          Perhaps that's because they had a different opinion about KDE3.5 and decided that given the mess that was KDE4 they should do something about it.

          See the thing about Linux and its ecosystem is if you don't like something you have a choice and can go somewhere else. Peoples tastes differ and just because you do not care for a particular DE does not make it worthless.

          Oh, and by the way, I agree with you about KDE4 and was so glad when I came across MATE so I could have a desktop that got out of my way and let me get on with the real purpose of my PC, doing stuff.

          1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

            Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

            > Perhaps that's because they had a different opinion about KDE3.5

            Well, yes, obviously, I would think so.

            > and decided that given the mess that was KDE4 they should do something about it.

            In the context of KDE 4, yes, that seems entirely understandable to me.

            I have tried MATE. I quite like it: it does the job and, as you say, it gets out of the way. The deal-breaker for me is that its support for vertical taskbars is just as broken and non-functional as GNOME 2's was, and so for that reason, it doesn't work for me. On a widescreen monitor, for me, the wasted space of a horizontal panel has to be put to very good use to be worthwhile. For instance, the global menu bar in macOS or Unity. For a mere app-switcher, I want that stacked vertically, but with the contents still arranged horizontally in rows.

            Windows has done that since the late betas of Win95. MATE still cannot.

        2. Zolko Silver badge

          Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

          KDE 1 was fine for that time. KDE 2 was better looking, still good. KDE 3 was awesome, and KDE 4 a nightmare.

          Now, KDE 5 is perfect: good looking, stable, gets out of the way, highly customizable, but has still the best overall tools for Kmail and Kalendar, Dolphin, Konsole Kate&Kwrite ... I don't understand why anyone would inflict Gnome on himself.

        3. Alistair

          Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

          Liam:

          KDE3 was ugly as sin, but it did just work. Perhaps, now, looking back from Plasma it did have some horrible inconsistencies and misfires but they were not (from my perspective) as bad as what was occurring in gnome. For my systems I had a theme that I liked, and had patched up to what I wanted. (and the folks around my desk at work learned of my love for the colour purple from that)

          Again, there were at the time lots of WM's out there. Blackbox, XFCE and such were popular alternatives even then.

      2. Alistair
        Windows

        Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

        @ karlkarl:

        Would you honestly say that things have become better in terms of UI?

        Honestly in the early part of KDE4 I was using XFCE for a while. But, after the disaster that moving to KDE4 (pre .5) entailed, the UI has improved. Plasma just does what I want it to and stays out of my way.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: I don't think there's very little you can do about it

      Mostly KDE here, too ... but I'll admit to having skipped a version or two.

      KDE is the easiest interface I've found to keep MeDearOldMum, Great Aunt and the Wife happy, so I use it myself for most mundane day to day tasks, just to keep my reflexes in shape.

      The "serious" environment usually runs XFCE, but I'd probably be happy switching to KDE for everything if XFCE went TITSUP.

      All of the above is on Slackware, which just works.

  2. karlkarl Silver badge

    Looking at the screenshot (around 1024x768), you can see that both versions of the Gnome 3 text editor are absolute shite in terms of space. They are both too fat and just waste screen real estate making the whole thing feel claustophobic.

    Yes, we typically have higher resolution screens now compared to the Windows NT 4.0 days but is the solution really to simply make everything larger to fill them and take up the same amount of space? Seems pointless. I personally would prefer a lower resolution screen, a more appropriate GUI system and save a shedload of battery to power the screen.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Remember that MS-Windows became popular when the normal resolution was 640x480. Make an application window that small nowadays and see how much usable space there is.

      1. ChrisC Silver badge

        And remember that before the PC reached VGA-levels of resolution, there were home computers providing GUIs that were even more capable than Windows was (some might even argue than Windows still *is*) on screens that were even lower resolution than that - my first proper foray into the world of GUIs was with Workbench on the Amiga, which on the display hardware I had at the time ran at 640x256, or 640x512 if I wanted to give myself a headache by enabling interlace mode.

        When every pixel mattered, UI designers had no choice but to put in the effort and come up with some UIs which were wonderfully useable despite the limited space they had to work with, and which were clearly aimed at providing the user of that UI with as much space as possible for *them* to work with. I forget the last time I saw a current generation UI which made me think the designers had the same level of respect for the end users...

        1. theOtherJT Silver badge

          512x342

          Apple System 1.0

          And perfectly usable. Clear. Concise. For the capabilities of a literal 2 colour black and white screen, I would even argue quite attractive. I would be pretty much fine with a desktop that looked like that today - although yes, I'd definitely want a bigger screen - but stylistically it's an improvement over a _lot_ of modern desktops. At least it would be easy to get work done on.

    2. theOtherJT Silver badge

      Yes, they are, but look how much _better_ the "Old" GEdit is than the "modern" text editor. They've removed a bunch of information from the new one that's right there in the old one - and that's still _shit_ compared to basically any app of the "pre modern ui" era where there would still be a "File Edit View Help" menubar at the top with _all_ the controls in rather than hiding them in a little burger button where it now takes 6 clicks drilling through sub-menus to find anything.

      1. FeepingCreature Bronze badge

        kwrite menu bar

        File Edit View Bookmarks Tools Settings Help... in 2022.

        I do all my coding for work in kwrite. It's simple and gets out of the way. Between fzf, yakuake and kwrite, I have all the IDE features I need.

      2. Updraft102

        Menubar... on pretty much every window I have open now. I insist on it for anything important.

    3. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

      I suppose when you got a laser printer, you started to print all your documents at 3 point text too because you could...

      Resolution is not the same as size. Bumping up the number of pixels on your display doesn’t give you more space to lay out your work - or improve your eyesight. And making the display itself bigger also comes with a penalty.

      First off, the limiting factor for information density on any interactive display is the human operator. Text needs to be large enough to be clearly readable at the typical viewing distance. That means larger type size (in pixels) and greater line-spacing. The reason your modern UI’s default settings on a 4k monitor still uses the same physical character size today as a VT100 (around 2.0 x 3.5 mm) is because that character size was not pulled out of a hat; it is the result of detailed study of human vision and ergonomics.

      UI controls also need to be larger, but for a different reason. Monitors have got bigger physically. Whereas twenty years ago a single 17 inch monitor was the norm, and 30 inch the practical limit, now that norm is 24 inches, and the maximum can be multiple 35-inch displays. Because the distance you have to move the mouse cursor can now be much, much bigger than before, it is much harder to accurately position that cursor on buttons that are further away - so because the average display surface areas get bigger, the controls must get bigger too for the system to remain usable. (The theoretical basis of this has been understood since the 1950s, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law)

      But the problems with this KDE release aren’t density, but misunderstanding of the rules they’re working with, and instead aping the mistakes made by an existing popular system (the fallacy of assuming that popularity means high quality). They have made the same mistake that Apple made with iOS7 when they tried to copy Windows Phone’s minimalist UI - they went too far, and simply removed all the button-borders and other visual signifiers from their UI without providing anything else in their place. The result is a mess.

      Windows Phone gets a lot of blame for this, but it’s misplaced. Anyone who has actually used a Windows Phone device will tell you that its UI may have been flat, but it was still distinguishable: yes, there were only a handful of visual cues, but they were used consistently across the whole UI - and the Windows Phone UI did feature boxed buttons; frameless buttons are an abomination that the world can than Apple for. As an example, colour was consistently used as an interaction cue: pretty much any text drawn in the UI highlight colour would react to touch - Apple badly broke this basic rule when it did iOS 7, indiscriminately using colour both as a decoration and as a interaction cue. The irony that it was Apple being so ignorant of basic design principles isn’t lost on this ex-employee, but that’s what you get when you fire all your UI designers (the Human Interface Group was closed back in the late 1990s) and expect graphic artists to have the same skillset. “Looks like” is not “works like”

  3. theOtherJT Silver badge

    I hate "modern" UIs.

    It's like people went out of the way to deliberately waste screen real-estate while simultaneously making it harder and harder each iteration to determine what is and is not a button. Everyone needs to stop with this shit and actually provide a theming engine that works properly.

    Sure, you should provide a good default theme, and a good default theme will be a selling point, but if your plan for "enforcing style guidelines" is all about preventing people from doing anything else you should probably ask yourself why people *want* to do something else and if your style guidelines are - in fact - complete bullshit.

    1. Binraider Silver badge

      Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

      Talking of which, what is the obsession with disappearing and/or near invisible scroll bars.

      1. LionelB Silver badge

        Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

        <rant> Aargh! You said it. Drives me nuts. Don't want to even think of the time I've wasted trying to turn that bloody "feature" off. And then, the'll randomly disappear again, due to some obscure, undocumented change in the theme configuration system (which is, of course, wildly inconsistent across desktops, GUI toolkits and individual applications). And all to "save" 10 pixels of vertical screen estate!? </rant>

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

          Where is my TWM desktop manager from the 90s on X ? Very lightweight, slim as heck, all buttons identifiable, I miss it.

          1. LionelB Silver badge

            Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

            Still around, in a repository near you.

            See also: fvwm, Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox (my personal favourite).

          2. keithpeter Silver badge
            Windows

            Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

            Doing fine as a fallback.

      2. Warm Braw

        Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

        Even the original Mac with its tiny screen had scrollbars that would have been big enough for a touch interface, had one existed.

        Even the lines in the sickeningly ubiquitous hamburger seem to be getting finer and finer.

      3. Ian Johnston Silver badge

        Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

        I think it's because the designers think everyone has touch screens. I want my bloody scroll arrows back too.

    2. tux_is_god

      Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

      Totally agree, Tab (and title bars) being a slight different shade between in-active and active ones. CSD another borked idea, needs to go away -- it's window manager's job to manage max/min buttons and title bars etc, CSD also breaks point to focus.

      Feel that most of the UI designers are complete idiots, can you imagine the chaos if they were left to design traffic lights, all the lights would be just different shades of the same colour.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Pirate

      Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

      From the article, regarding libadwaita: "The purpose of this is to help developers conform to the new GNOME Human Interface guidelines"

      One look to rule them all

      One look to find them

      One look to bring them all

      And in the FLATNESS, *BIND* *THEM*

      Muahahahahaha!

      (or that's how I imagine their arrogantly top-down 2D FLATSO UI design tyranny to have become this way)

      GTK4 - you can take your Adwaita and SHOVE IT UP YOUR UI!!!

      (NOBODY *COMPELS* ME - I *REBEL* INSTEAD!)

      I'm sure Mate and Cinnamon will continue to get the REAL support, while these ARROGANT LOONS jump off the 2D FLATTY "modern" CLIFF. Enjoy your 'customer base' of fanatics. The rest of us that want to get REAL work done will install something ELSE.

      (Worthy of mention, Devuan to eliminate systemd for Linux, and the BSDs as well)

    4. razzaDazza1234
      Happy

      Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

      Agree completely, Linux UI is kitchen sink. Horrible. Always has been. Let's not even mention Ubuntu's orange and purple colour scheme. sick emoji.

      Let's but honest. Mint, which I use, is Windows XP design based and ugly as hell. It can be made more bearable but customising it to look like an Apple or Windows 10/11.

      Windows 10/11 is quite pretty in comparison. But surely then MacOS or iOS does the job? They do and are classy, but still naff. iOS14.x feels like it;s a re-skinned iOS from 10 years ago. So old-fashioned.

      UX/UI is very very difficult. I bet none that said they hated it can do it. You probably dislike the 'creatives' that produce them, with their pretty clothes and silly fashions and ladies that follow them around. LOL

      Besides which, you are barking up the wrong doorstep! A lot of new design comes from AI. We have nearly exhausted our own creative abilities in UI. Just image the sheer volume of people working on UI - not just the designers but all you users, testing, feeding back, etc. It is the hottest topic of the century.

      BCI.

      1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

        Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

        “Creatives” shouldn’t be let near user interfaces until they have been properly designed. UI is strictly speaking a branch of ergonomics, and the people I know of who did it for a living are serious engineering types.

        The problem is that a device’s user-interface is now seen as a marketing point, not a functional one. That means lots of flashy but sub-optimal solutions get chosen over those that are more functional.

        Unfortunately this trend is creeping out of computing/web/phones and into areas where it’s starting to pose genuine problems. Those cars with touch-screen-only secondary controls are effectively unusable for elderly or other users with poor fine motor skills (=the ability to accurately position and work with your fingers), whose motor skills would otherwise be perfectly adequate to safely pilot a car. Previously, both the secondary (air, radio, seats...) and the primary ( steering, speed, brake, indicators) controls in a car have gone through decades of usability engineering to ensure that they can be used by people with pretty much any level of fine motor control, but the shift to touch-screen for secondary controls has undone that good work. It has, however, saved money (if you think Tesla uses touchscreens because they’re cool, you should look at the costs of designing and making physical control buttons sometime)

        1. mjflory

          Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

          > “Creatives” shouldn’t be let near user interfaces until they have been properly designed.

          Properly designing "creatives" is a nearly impossible task.

          No, seriously, your points are very well taken. After all, if the driver can't manage the car's UI, the result can be a crash. That's true of computers too, I suppose, but the results are usually less dire.

  4. jake Silver badge
    Pint

    bob ...

    ... breathe, buddy!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

    Link: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/something_for_the_weekend/

    COINCIDENCE: Alistair Dabbs wrote the above article LAST FRIDAY. How apposite!! Quote:

    "A Great Idea (Level 4) is known as an Armstrong-Osman. It's a clever-sounding idea that can be adequately implemented but no one knows why. It is, arguably, pointless." Yup....GNOME!!!

    The Gnome folk have got EVERYTHING wrong, every possible way. How long have you got? So:

    (1) Gnome 2 was fine. Then in 2011 we got the abortion called Gnome 3!

    (See Linus quoted in El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/2011/08/05/linus_slams_gnome_three/)

    (2) Not content with that 2021 got us Gnome 4.....another disaster.

    (3) But even worse....GTK3 was useful......but no.......GTK4 came along in time for Gnome 4.

    And GTK4 is not backward compatible with GTK3. A nightmare for developers who have been using GTK3 for years.

    (4) It gets worse......Gnome 4 uses both GTK3 and GTK4.

    If you want to see just how f****d up GTK4 is, just take a look at the so called "guidance" for those of us who might want to migrate stuff that works in GTK3:

    (5) https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html Hundreds of helpful hints of the form "Do not use X"

    ......where X can be ALMOST ANYTHING you used to use in GTK3!!

    Alistair Dabbs got the GTK folk and the GNOME folk dead to rights......no wonder developers are moving rapidly to other graphical toolkits, notably Qt.

    And this AC has been happy with XFCE for the last ten years. I wonder why?

    1. NATTtrash
      WTF?

      Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

      And this AC has been happy with XFCE for the last ten years. I wonder why?

      I'm in your xfce camp, but there too this silliness is trickling through. So I suppose we should not be too smug.

      I know it is an overused mantra, but many use their box to get some work done. Even if you do not care about flatness, even if you need strong specs to see the shape of those "all important corners", you do get hindered making your humble pay if some GUI designer with too much time on her/ his hands starts moving and hiding essential functions and elements. Don't get me wrong, I too love it when stuff is pleasing to my no doubt very personal eyes. But FFS, we already found out some decades ago that it would be handy for productivity if some things are self explanatory. Intuitive. If critical functions answer to uniformity. But noooo, let's move "Open" buttons all over the place. Let's hide "Print" and "Preferences" since users are too stupid any way to need/ use those functions. And if they aren't, well, then they probably have just as much time to waste as those visionary GUI designers to repair things (install, distro hop, adapt CSS, what ever).

      Maybe they should speak with the people of Ubuntu who designed the screen for that forced fed snap install for FireFox. Silly me noticed that there was just an "OK" button. Looked for a standard interface default "Cancel" button, but I suppose it wasn't allowed according those modern SUKU (shut up, kneel user) design guidelines. Now that's brilliant with regard to screen real estate efficiency, right?

    2. MyffyW Silver badge

      Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

      Another upvote for XFCE ... does what it needs to do as efficiently as possible

      1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

        XFCE on some systems, Openbox on others - depending on what they are used for.

        1. 42656e4d203239 Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

          >>Openbox

          Just installed an Openbox based fork of Manjaro (Mabox if anyone wants to know).. I can honestly say it's sweet as for my use-case.

          I may even install Openbox on the host machine in place/alongside KDE Plasma <whatever>

        2. Steve Graham

          Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

          Many years ago, I realised that I didn't know what a "desktop environment" was useful for. So I just installed Openbox and the various tools and utilities I needed, some of them from the XFCE stable.

          1. LionelB Silver badge

            Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

            Settled on Fluxbox almost two decades ago, and never found a reason to change (okay, occasionally XFCE to access some odd config UI). No frills, fast, minimal resource usage, stable, easily configurable, stays out of the way, just works. Can even be quite sleek and pretty, if minimalism is your thing.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

      A *BRILLIANT* collection of links. Thanks!

      From the 2nd one (Linus): "I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3."

      From the 3rd one: GTK 4 is a major new version of GTK that breaks both API and ABI compared to GTK 3.x (Yes - they REALLY! SAID! THAT!!!)

  6. saramakos

    Guess there's a reason I still stick with FVWM2 after all these years!

    1. MyffyW Silver badge

      I feel I must give an honorable mention to twm

      fy twmpathau

      1. LionelB Silver badge

        Blackbox! Window Maker!

        (Still on Fluxbox to this day. How does anyone get anything done without tabbed windows?)

      2. LionelB Silver badge

        fy twmpathau

        Does that really mean what Google Translate says it means...?

  7. Kev99 Silver badge

    Boo-hoo-hoo. So it doesn't ape mictosoft's earth shattering, never before done, be all to end all windows layout. Big whup. As long as it does what it's supposed to do, bid deal. (Can't say the same about mictosoft.)

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      I struggle to understand how this is the conclusion you came to after carefully reading the article. You did carefully read the article, right?

    2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge
      Angel

      mictosoft

      Oh $DEITY I hope you called them that on purpose!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ubuntu MATE on my desktops; it runs happily under X2Go sessions, which are handy if you don't have direct access to a VMWare instance manager. :)

  9. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Flame

    I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

    You are not alone.

    I don't want to mess around with the look and feel particularly; I don't lose sleep if a screen control is three pixels to the left. Just either give me something good enough to use without wincing every time, or offer me a way to change it *easily*.

    As in: don't just offer me a list of named themes; show me a picture. Don't make scroll bars so thin they need single-pixel precision to hit. And FFS stop changing things just for the sake of change. We learned that lesson a long time ago...

    p.s. this also applies to websites: microscopic light grey text on a slightly lighter grey background, with text columns six hundred words wide, helps no-one. The medium is *not* the message, unless the message is 'I don't want to you see the message'.

    1. vtcodger Silver badge

      Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

      light grey text on a slightly lighter grey background...

      OPINION:Too right. Designers need to understand that few user displays have consistent much less properly adjusted gamma (intensity vs signal level) curves. On top of which one suspects that Red, Green and Blue vary a bit in shade from device to device. I'm pretty sure that is why material that is readable and cool on the creator's display may be garish (OK but jarring) or hard to read (not so OK) for many viewers. Really now. How many users know that selecting unreadable text areas (if one can figure out how) may convert an unreadable blur into a readable color combination when the text is highlighted? And why should users have to do that?

      The solution: Restrain creative urges. Use high contrast color pairs -- black on white, yellow on black. We users have enough problems with often dubious attempts to create material that is usable with both PCs and smart phones. We really don't need additional aggravation layered on only for style. (And maybe remember that some users have one one of the many varieties of color blindness and will not be enthused about material that -- for them -- uses near identical foreground and background colors).

      1. ChrisC Silver badge

        Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

        And give users the choice of how to configure THEIR user environment to THEIR preferences and requirements, don't ever dare to presume that just because your job title is "UI Designer", you know better than the people using your creation how good their ability is to cope with the defaults you've chosen.

        Microsoft used to be bloody amazing at this - from my first encounters with 3.1 all the way through to 7, there was always a natively provided way to tweak the UI just the way I liked it. Even their early forays into mobile phones showed a level of user friendliness that iOS and Android would do well to be inspired by. Then the idiots took over and from 8 onwards each new version of Windows brings more designer ego and less user control to the table.

        Whether MS were influenced by others, or whether it's MS who've been the influencer, it's clear that UI design in general over this time period has grown steadily more and more user hostile. Hence why we're now having pretty much the same anguished debate over how crap this latest iteration of a Linux UI is as we've had in the past with Windows, and which without any shadow of doubt we'll have about some other modern UI if el Reg run an article on it.

        When will the wheel turn full circle and UI designers start remembering what the U in UI stands for?

        1. ttlanhil

          Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

          It used to be that UI design was a big thing - these days it's more UX.

          As in, instead of interfacing with the user, you give them an experience.

          Well... They do manage that!

          1. bombastic bob Silver badge
            Joke

            Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

            instead of interfacing with the user, you give them an experience

            Reminds me of a light bulb joke

            Q: "How many people from Silicon Valley does it take to change a light bulb?"

            A: "Three, One to change the bulb, and 2 to 'share in the experience'."

            (even though in California, selling traditional light bulbs is now ILLEGAL. Go fig... maybe that helps to EXPLAIN THE INSANITY)

            /me humming song by Jimmy Hendrix now... ":Have you been experienced?"

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

      And FFS stop changing things just for the sake of change. We learned that lesson a long time ago...

      Once a project has been maintained long enough for original developers to retire (or move on to other projects), such that the inexperienced CHILDREN take over, because "It is OUR turn now", the end result is likely to be a series of UNWANTED and UNNECESSARY changes, which [for something like Gnome] has been nothing but DISAPPOINTMENT for a LOT of us.

      2D FLATSO interfaces, in general, fall directly into this pattern. It is a BAD trend, and has been since Gnome 3 as far as i can tell (when it seems to have begun).

      (I could easily use CSS to make buttons and stuff look 3D skeuomorphic, or at least have a nice shadow effect, if they INSIST that everything be like a web page based on CSS... but CSS requires a bloatware browser engine to render it. i rest my case on that one)

  10. Ian Johnston Silver badge

    The existence of the GNOME developer community means that the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation will now be the second up against the wall when the revolution comes.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. steelpillow Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

    We read that Adwaita is now to be enforced and app-specific theming ignored. This is bad and good.

    Rule No.1. Never dictate the desktop theme. Users have widely differing needs. Make it easy to tweak and/or replace the desired theme.

    Rule No.2. App-specific themes are fundamentally a shite idea (ain't it th' truth. MOZILLA FIREFOX I'm lookin' at YOU!!!). ignoring them is a smart move. If there are apps that really cannot take the desktop skin, then make it easy to add little styling add-ons to the main styling tree and advise app builders to give all their custom prettifications a unique uri. But give the user a prominent banhammer to evade the egotistical idiots (MOZILLA FIREFOX I'm STILL lookin' at YOU!!!).

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

      If you don't like Firefox, you could use Chrome. Or you could fork it and write your own version.

      On the substantive point: there is very little you can do about an app that doesn't want to use the OS look and feel.

      There are really two groups of users. There are "natives" who stick to one platform and one theme, never see another one, and want everything consistent with their choices. And there are "cosmopolitans" who see the app on lots of platforms and want the app to look and behave consistently on both. Guess which class the devs fall in.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

        Firefox originally took great pains to follow the OS' theme then the UXers took over the asylum.

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

      MOZILLA FIREFOX I'm STILL lookin' at YOU!!!

      here's how I eliminate their Adwaita takeover. You need to specify a theme, though, and my preference is TraditionalOk

      From the command line:

      gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme 'TraditionalOk'

      From about:config

      widget.content.gtk-theme.override = TraditionalOk

      widget.non-native.theme.enabled = false

      (that should fix it, YMMV on using a different theme name)

  12. Binraider Silver badge

    Fedora still has users?

    Victms would be a fairer assessment.

    1. Artem S Tashkinov

      Works beautifully with XFCE.

      I don't have a single Gnome package installed.

      GTK is but then it's needed but a ton of applications including Firefox and Chrome (?).

  13. Tom 38

    Menwhile, MATE just looks and behaves the same as it always has. My "goal"* is to switch to a proper big boy tiling wm and use wayland and swaywm - I know I could use i3 and get the same things, but wayland is definitely the future and I'm not switching twice...

    * goal: n. A thing that I make no progress towards achieving, but sits in the back of my mind..

    1. Steve Graham

      I'm sticking to Xorg until the majority realise that Wayland is the SystemD of graphical technology.

      1. cornetman Silver badge

        > ... that Wayland is the SystemD of graphical technology.

        Really? I thought that the whole point of Wayland was to be a lot simpler and niftier than X.org by removing a lot of the unuseful cruft.

        If all that systemd did was to offer another init alternative then I don't think there would be such a backlash against it. If Wayland (and Weston) can give us a slicker, smaller, more focused display controller, I think that would be a win.

    2. mfalcon

      Lots of web designers should go up against the nearest wall

      MATE just works. I run it on a tiny FreeBSD VM as part of my VNC setup. I then use a Raspberry Pi or TightVNC on my Windows boxen to display the desktop. Simple and fast it does everything I need.

      There seem to be a generation of developers who have forgotten that some users just want stuff that works. I blame Apple for a lot of this stupidity but they aren't the only one responsible for the current mess. Lots of web designers should go up against the nearest wall.

      Change of the sake of change has caused more harm to the usability of Linux than almost anything else.

  14. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    -> its new look and feel doesn't yet include all of the environment. This is already causing rumblings of discontent.

    The Linux way of doing things. You can always fork it to GNG -> Gng's not Gnome.

    1. Altrux

      Guh-nome

      GNOME = Gaaah, Needlessly Obtuse Mindf*ck Environment

  15. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    Nothing you can do about it?

    -> now there's very little you can do about it

    Wrong. You can fork it.

    -> ever-flatter look

    I detest this stupidity that is present on macOS too. Bring back 3d borders. The flat look is like the 1960s style tower block of crap design.

    1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Re: Nothing you can do about it?

      -> now there's very little you can do about it

      Wrong. You can fork it.

      No, you almost certainly can't, although you may.

  16. Ross 12

    I get the feeling that a lot of the drive for this stuff is that the current generation of developers are using cheap chromebooks despite many users having desktops with big screens. Hence everything now is tied to keyboard shortcuts and 'command palettes' (because nobody likes using touchpads), and an app's entire UI is crammed into it's titlebar because the devs have little vertical screen space.

    And as for theming - Linux and FOSS was always about choice and giving power to users. I'm all for having a really nice default look, but you can't even tweak the colours (apparently Ubuntu are patching in the ability to choose a single accent colour?) Instead of taking theming away, why couldn't they go the other way and design a proper, robust, theming API? In fact, a cross-DE or even cross-OS theming API would be amazing. Users could choose their preferences for colour schemes, rounded/square corners, shadows, transparency, mono/outline/full colour icons, etc and each theme can implement those preferences within its own style. The API could also generate contrasting or complementary colours as needed based on the user choice of primary colour, or pick from the background image etc.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Childcatcher

      The problem (in their minds, as I see it) is that if users make CHOICES, it may not be the "right" choice (according to their 'feelz').

      So "they" must TAKE CHOICE AWAY, "for our own good".

      (I posted the 'One look to rule them all' parody earlier so I'll just make reference to it instead)

  17. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    Windows XP theming...

    -> Windows XP made theming part of Windows and was thus a strong incentive to switch to Linux, or Mac OS X, or indeed anything else

    Get the hell out of here! Windows XP was far more successful that anything Linux has ever produced. I can not think of a single person who switched from XP to Linux because of theming.

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Windows XP theming...

      Erm, 99.9% of people people don't switch OSes ever, and 99.9% of those people don't even know they have the option. Most people will always just stick with whatever OS shipped with the hardware (or whatever they are obliged to use at work/school/college) - and why shouldn't they, if what they get works? Sure, they'll grumble about GUI changes - and then just get used to them, as they either don't see they have a choice, or, if they do, reckon (correctly) that a transition to a completely different OS would be if anything more jarring.

      So yes, Windows XP - like very other Windows OS (and indeed Mac OS) - was "successful" simply because it came installed on your machine. In the same way that Android and iOS are "successful" on mobiles.

      1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

        Re: Windows XP theming...

        So you are confirming I was right. There was no incentive to switch to Linux.

        1. vtcodger Silver badge

          Re: Windows XP theming...

          "There was no incentive to switch to Linux."

          I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to Linux a couple of decades ago because of a combination of combat fatigue -- I was tired of fighting with my OS to get simple things done simply -- and a (correct as it turns out) guess that market forces would cause Microsoft to become increasingly user-hostile in future decades.

          But you're right in a way. Themes had nothing to do with my switch. The @#!% Registry however ...

        2. LionelB Silver badge

          Re: Windows XP theming...

          Um, no, I'm not confirming you're right. Re-read my post.

        3. keithpeter Silver badge
          Windows

          Re: Windows XP theming...

          That wasn't actually what you said in the grandparent post now was it.

          (To each his own and good luck if you find what you use now fully cromulent)

  18. Abominator

    And this is why the year of the Linux desktop will always be far in the future.

    GTK4 is also slow as dog shit with heavy resource usage. Oh and breaking ABI changes.

    Win32 has been pretty stable for decades. Apple Cocoa has been stable for a long time also.

    GTK keeps getting broken. The developers need taking outside.

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      "And this is why the year of the Linux desktop will always be far in the future."

      No, that won't be the reason. The reason will be the same as it ever was: that PC/laptop manufacturers will continue to ship their hardware with Windows/Mac pre-installed, and ordinary users do not change OSes (or even realise that the option exists).

    2. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

      -> And this is why the year of the Linux desktop will always be far in the future.

      Another reason is the constant reinvention, the constant rebuilding in whatever programming language is topical, of things which should by now be stable.

      I remember a few years ago Ruby on Rails was popular. At a place where I was working at the time, some people wanted to rebuild something which was already running well, which was well understood by those who maintained and supported it, and didn't have any significant problems, on Ruby on Rails. It wasn't going to be a 'big' improvement. It would instead have been a lot of work just to get to the stage where we already were. It's just a rewrite in a popular language.

      That anecdote is a metaphor for Linux on the desktop. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. But not get any further ahead.

      1. LionelB Silver badge

        Everything you said there holds almost verbatim for Windows.

      2. Ian Johnston Silver badge

        Another reason is the constant reinvention, the constant rebuilding in whatever programming language is topical, of things which should by now be stable.

        And how many times have you now written in these comments that anyone who doesn't like something about Linux should just fork it? It's precisely because a very small number of people do just that that the mess you describe has arisen.

        1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

          -> And how many times have you now written in these comments that anyone who doesn't like something about Linux should just fork it?

          Clearly you do not understand irony and sarcasm.

          1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

            I understand them enough to make them clear in my writing.

    3. vtcodger Silver badge

      Surely the Unix desktop is alive and well

      I suspect that the reason that Linux isn't used all that much by individual users is the insistence by purists that users have to be Unix System administrators running as individual users. Unix system administration is really difficult and using that sudo mess to do simple stuff like backups is a bit off-putting for average users. Especially because Unix software isn't all that great about telling one that it can't do that Dave because Dave doesn't have admin rights. It all too often quietly ignores all or part of commands unless one simply ignores the "rules" and runs everything as root.

      But really now, Android, MacOS and ChromeOS are all quite popular and they are all Unixen of one sort or another.

      I recently bought a cheap chromebook and rather to my surprise I don't really dislike it all that much. My principle complaints are lack of a real Delete key and dubious discoverability. (Well those and Google's spying). And maybe I just haven't discovered how to discover stuff without resorting to the interwebs. There is even a Unix console available if one invokes the proper spells. I haven't really tried it except to verify it does some basic commands. But it's there. And AFAICS this thing is every bit as usable as modern Windows.

      1. LionelB Silver badge

        Re: Surely the Unix desktop is alive and well

        Almost everything -- no, everything -- you said in that first paragraph is wrong.

        You know Windows also has an Administrator privilege level, and that Windows system administration is probably on the same level of "difficulty" as Linux, right? And that you do not need admin privileges to do basic user tasks such as backups on Linux? You are aware also, are you not, that until around XP (or maybe 7, even) Windows was a security disaster precisely because you were obliged to escalate to admin privileges to do almost anything useful (this harks back to Windows originally, unlike Unix, being essentially a single-user OS)?

        Yes, Linux certainly encourages a strict demarcation between user and system administration - this makes perfect sense from a security perspective (especially on multi-user systems), and protects the user from accidentally breaking things. (And I really can't recall any program which failed to inform me if it required admin privileges to do what I expected it to do.)

        And as I have mentioned on other threads, the principal reason that Linux is not mainstream on desktop/PC is purely and simply because desktop/PC hardware always ships with Windows (or Mac OS) pre-installed, and most users are probably not even aware that they could change OS if they wanted.

  19. mark l 2 Silver badge

    GNOME developers have always done what they see as their own vision of for the Linux desktop, and not everyone agrees with that hence forks like MATE came along which went their own way from GNOME and is my personal choice for a DE. That's the advantage of FOSS is if you don't like the way some project is heading you can always jump ship to another or even create your own fork if you have the skills.

    Where as MS decided to dick around with the start menu from Windows 8 onwards constantly changing it with every new release and you have to implement 3rd party hacks to get it as you prefer it to be, which can get patched by MS at any moment with a windows update because they get to dictate how YOUR computers DE should behave.

    1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

      The average person has below average taste

      And that applies to me, too. But at least I have sense enough not to inflict my preferences on other people.

      "GNOME developers have always done what they see as their own vision of for the Linux desktop"

      They should stop doing that. These visionaries are wasting their own time and the user's patience by making *any* changes to the design. Put the usability back in the GUI, and make all the preferences easily customisable. That customisable part (via coding) is what the developers should hopefully be good at, because as designers they are hopeless failures.

    2. Mac Logo

      Microsoft have dicked around with the Start Menu in every single version since they introduced it in Win95. And every time, someone's written a tool to emulate the previous version.

  20. Altrux

    Wheels to Reinvent

    Modern UIs feel like they've gone backwards in the last 20 years. The Linux desktop I had back in 2003 (early KDE) was very pretty: easily themeable, nice 3D effects, usable and powerful. Now we've all just spent 20 years constantly reinventing wheels, changing things, changing them back again, then making a square wheel and reinventing that. The overall effect is that we've gone nowhere, or backwards. So much wasted effort on this nonsense, and a complete lack of genuinely fresh and better ideas.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Wheels to Reinvent

      Modern UIs feel like they've gone backwards in the last 20 years

      (even though you did use the 'F' word, 'feel' - heh)

  21. WowandFlutter

    The current fad for excessive whitespace around icons and gui elements is a total nightmare - it's not just Gnome and Linux but MacOS and Windows are guilty too.

    I seem to have less screen real-estate now on a 5K screen than I did 15 years ago on a 1080x768. All because of some perceived need to make desktop and tablet interfaces the same.

    A few years ago I spent sometime teaching visually impaired computer users to edit audio using various Windows and Mac DAWs. The change from bordered icons to a new style of borderless or focus on hover icons made the packages unusable overnight. The so called 'Accessibilty' options don't help either - it's very difficult for the gui to highlight a non-existant border.

    1. david 12 Silver badge

      I'm only old, not blind, and I'd sit here clicking up votes for the next 20 minutes if they allowed that.

      The change from bordered icons to a new style of borderless or focus on hover icons made the packages unusable overnight.

  22. Pelican Express

    That's enough I switch to KDE

    What bothers me the most in modern UI is they are all gray. Personally this becomes very confusing when there are many overlapping windows. It becomes hard to distinguish the window in focus as it is drown among many other windows having the exact same background.

    Somehow I prefer the old fashion style, the windows with a colored title bar. The windows which are not in focus have a dim titlebar. But this doesn't exist anymore by default. With Gnome I need to install extension and hunt for custom themes. I went so far as learning how to edit the gtk.css as most of themes authors also abandon the idea of colored titlebar. Not sure if this is good design or just copycat game.

    That GTK4 on theme change is the last drop. Now I am going to switch to KDE. Which allows the user to customize the UI. Surprisingly also down to the titlebar color.

  23. ecofeco Silver badge

    Flat, pale, non-contrast, must die

    The modern trend of barely legible use interfaces must die.

  24. sreynolds

    I didn't notice....

    Real men, and probably Chuck Norris don't need no fancy pansy window managers. They just use the kernels VCs. The only time they used X was when the kernel couldn't do modesetting.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: I didn't notice....

      Real men gravitated to X when they discovered how many Xterms they could keep open to each system in the network, and then use the Boss's biggie-wiggie mega-PC, perpetually working it's monitor to the bone running a fish tank screensaver, as a home for compilers.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Urgh 2D desktops.. why can't we just use a sort of a VR world we can build to look like we want, with apps and data and stuff scattered around using whatever metaphors clicks with us, and have friends over to chill with us and work with stuff together in our cool 3D shared metaphor illusion thing

    It'd be like *wow I love your wm theme" :D

    1. jake Silver badge

      "It'd be like *wow I love your wm theme" :D"

      It'd probably be more like "Dude, get a cleaner in. This place is a sty!"

      1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

        It's ok, there's a theme to hide that.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft Research experimented with 3D desktops back in the late 90s. They sucked more donkey balls than the Donkey Sucker 3000.

      More recent demos using AR headsets look just as impractical and sucky.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A Gift for Microsoft and Apple?

    It's things like this that practically guarantee Microsoft and Apple will continue to mint $billions out of proprietary desktops for the foreseeable future.

    It also makes me wonder what the future of desktop Linux actually is. It's now getting to be viable to fulfill all of one's Linux GUI application needs using Windows Subsystem for Linux. How bad does Gnome / GTK have to get before Windows + WSL seems preferable?

    What is GTK4 For?

    Just glancing over some of the fluff on GTK4 is a wonder; GPU rendering of the GUI? Well gee, thanks for making it fast, but it's totally pointless if no one's software can use that without major rework.

    It just seems to be a project totally disconnected from reality. For example, look at slide 30 of this, which kind of says it all. "How You Can Help" it says, suggesting, "Write cool examples, Port an application, Convert custom widgets to new APIs, Find what doesn’t work, or is too complicated".

    That, frankly, is flabbergasting. It's saying that, if you choose to ride this bandwagon, there's a ton of work, it might be hard, it might not work, and it might change yet again (contrary to other assurances that, with GTK4, stability is a goal). With an invite like that, do you 1) accept it, or 2) stick with a mature, problem free version of a toolkit and keep that as a dependency for all time to come?

    I think a lot will choose 2). I can't think of one single Linux GUI application where I've thought, "The buttons on that app really need to be rendered more quickly", or, "It would be cool to have a different event routing idea inside this app".

    Unintended Consequences?

    Even if a development team were motivated to take the lid of their application and update it, these days there's a serious question. Going from GTK2/3 to 4 might be modest amounts of work, but a lot of the cost and difficulty is assembling the team to do anything at all. Is such an incremental update beneficial? Probably not.

    However, what if the application update were from GTK2/3 to Web, or Electron? Let's face it, for any application that needs a user base to justify work being done on it, aiming to have GTK4 as a dependency seems to be a limiting step. Things like Web or Electron might be seen as technologically shite, but they're shite with a wider potential user base.

    It's also notable that LibreOffice, a major example of a large application suite, makes sure it doesn't have such dependencies. LibreOffice uses VCL, a shim between their application code and an underlying framework. GTK? QT? GDI? Quartz? It's all the same to them, because of their shim. GTK4 broken? Rebuild for Qt.

    In fact, if one is going to take the lid off one's own C++ application in a major way, retargetting it to VCL looks like a pretty good idea. That way if some lunatic does take an axe to the stability of one framework, it's just a build option to switch to a different one and ignore the lunatic.

    Wireshark moved to Qt. As did Audacious. Whilst Gnome are continuously innovating the living daylights out of everyone else's previously working applications, the number of people willing to stay on their innovation bus is dropping.

    Innovation Can Be Pointless

    I get the need to innovate if there's some worthwhile ultimate goal. But in Linux graphics toolkits there isn't an worthwhile goal yet to be achieved. What Linux needs is a stable, boring, functional desktop environment that serious minded developers can just use. We had that once. Linux is never, ever going to become anyone's idea of a mass-market, do-anything uber-snappy desktop OS environment, so there's no point in trying.

    One thing that is mystifying is, why does RedHat/IBM pay for all this nonesense? Do they have a business goal to supplant MacOS or Windows? No. Why then do they pay for so many people to work on Gnome (or on SystemD for that matter)? Whatever the end result it, it's never going to make RedHat / IBM any more money than they already make from subscriptions, so it is just a cost. Do they ever wonder how the expenditure is theoretically supposed to turn into profit, or measure anything to see if it is?

    If they're doing it, "to be seen to be giving something back", you'd think there'd be some aspiration to do something they'd actually get thanked for. Does RedHat / IBM's management ever read anything about what other people think about what their team is producing?

  27. John Savard

    Open Source, isn't it?

    Given that GNOME is open-source, I thought there was plenty that one could do about it.

    Rewrite it so that it is once again desktop style-agnostic like the previous version, even though all the calls are compatible, and to boot rewrite the native applciations like the file manager to use the new toolkit.

    Just because the Gnome developers can't be bothered to get it right doesn't mean someone else can't.

  28. drankinatty

    Slow Motion Train-Wreck Since Gtk+3 Debued

    The writing has been on the wall for a long time. In the past with Gtk+2 there were literally hundreds, if not thousands of great Gtk+2 themes providing gtk+2, metacity and xfwm4 theming. Enter the Gtk+3 CSS debacle. For the entire 8+ years of Gtk+3 development, every new minor version broke compatibility with the prior minor version sending theme developers running like lemmings over a cliff. Gtk CSS elements were added, removed, changed and every existing theme relying on a changed element broke. This has, and from what I can tell, continue in Gtk4 (hopefully to a lesser degree)

    This article states that there are many themes to choose from and they are easily changed -- true only if you lower your expectations of what a theme can provide. What used to be included in a theme is no more. This is a result of fundamental changes to Gtk such as removal of Gtk programming elements like gtk_toolbar() that provided consistent size and spacing for icon toolbars. All of which could be programmatically set in Gtk+2, but now wildly vary in Gtk+3+ themes with CSS rendering (if you are lucky enough to have that element included in the CSS of the new theme)

    The result? Apps ported to Gtk+3 only displayed about 1/3 of the icons present in Gtk+2 toolbars and took almost double the vertical real estate due to CSS spacing issues and a lack of reasonable icon margin and border defaults. (and elements containing icons) This caused toolbars in ported apps to spill over into ellipsized menus (the ... or >> at the end of the icon row). The only work-around was for the app developer to provide their own icons or themes to control those elements, and preventing a new theme from being applied (Openoffice, Inkscape, and many more) It was Adwaita or a "box of chocolates" for toolbars.

    Gtk+2 applications (and the Gtk+2 toolkit itself) were easily themed and the theme author had control over virtually every aspect of the interface. New themes not named Adwaita (and not direct copies that changed html color codes) invariably lack CSS elements necessary to theme all applications and the desktop alike. (and if the app wasn't built on the same Gtk minor release, worse could happen if it runs at all)

    So enter the latest kludge, libadwaita. Now depending on the level of reliance on it's offerings by any one given app, you may or may not have a consistent look and feel for your desktop. A "theme" is no longer a "theme" for the desktop and all Gtk apps running, and the integrated consistent "look and feel" suffers. It boils down to replacing "programming" of the user-interface to having it render like a web page. We see the flat, drab, featureless desktop landscape that is the result.

    There are no panaceas out there. Broken look and feel doesn't discriminate and applies equally to all desktops that "port to a new toolkit" instead of being developed for it from the ground up. KDE/Plasma has been through the same growing pains since KDE 4.0.4a was unceremoniously forced on openSuSE users as the default desktop for the 11.0 release in May 2008 -- it hasn't recovered since. (though Plasma/Frameworks 5 is a lot closer to getting there than KDE4 ever got)

    About the only desktop that has weathered the Gtk CSS storm with some degree of success is XFCE. Not because it magically did something better to ease the transition, but simply because there was less of it there that had to be ported and re-themed.

    It all boils down to poor decisions made in the direction the desktops would take (and in Gnome's case, the Gtk toolkit as well). What was one of the most popular and well liked UI toolkits in Gtk+2, has literally been reduced to a Gnome-only support library. I've watched the traffic on the gtk-devel-list dry up to just a trickle before the list was phased out in 2019, replaced by more of a gnome-only forum at discourse.gnome.org. The desktop and the community has suffered as a result of the toolkit changes and the current dearth of community involvement and development with Gtk4.

    The sad part is there is no way to correct, fix, reverse, or undo more than a decade worth of wrong direction in a desktop and toolkit -- other than find a replacement.

  29. Marco van de Voort

    Windows 2000

    I share the authors view that the Windows HID experience went to hell after Windows 2000. Both the system and the emergence of more and more applications that didn't conform to HID guidelines.

    One of the core problems with theming is that it so enormously focuses on the visuals. While core nice things of the Windows experience is the consistency of the interface, which ties into assistive technologies and keyboard use. (I could install and configure Windows 2000 without touching a mouse!).

    Many ported apps do a half attempt at mimicking the visuals, but totally skip the rest of the HID guidelines (tab order?)

  30. Plest Silver badge
    Happy

    XFCE

    ...mic drop.

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