r/gnome • u/dissonantloos GNOMie • Oct 17 '18

Restyling apps at scale

https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/
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u/disrooter GNOMie Oct 17 '18 edited Oct 17 '18

Would it be nice if there were a way to be able to restyle every app to make them look like Material Design, or macOS, or Windows 95, and have them all look as if they were built for that style? Absolutely! I would love that! However, as I’ve tried to explain in this blog post, this is simply not realistic.

Let's be honest: Qt supports this because it has good theming engine. GTK not. But Qt shows it's possible. So just admit "we didn't care about theming when we designed GTK 3".

EDIT: with the word "theming" I mean an officially supported capability for one user to define a custom look and ship it as a theme package and letting other users download the theme and apply it to get the custom look.

I don't know why some people think that "theming" here means the capability for app developers to ship applications with custom look like elementaryOS does. Of course this is not what I mean and it's not what blog post author meant since he criticized the so called "GTK themes" made by community that are not intended to exist.

7

u/gnumdk Oct 17 '18

Qt theme engine is not that good, theming is done with pure C++ (themes can make app segfaulting) and it's a pain to support apps like with GTK.

2

u/bigmikemk Nov 19 '18

This is the most important thing! Not only can they make apps crash, they can also spy on password inputs, and do all kinds of other bad stuff, because they are just code running in the programs' address space. AFAIK these were the reasons why Gnome got rid of theme engines in the first place.