As much as I sympathise with developers over headaches caused by themeing, I believe users (myself included) would be less up-in-arms about it if applications were less ugly by default. And boy howdy is libadwaita ugly as sin.
I’d be perfectly willing to tolerate a mismatched system, if the individual components looked at least okay. Like I’m not going to get e.g. steam or discord to match an e.g. Windows 9x theme, and I’m mostly okay with that because they aren’t horrible to look at. But, say, File Roller? Absolutely not. Horribly ugly.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and though I’m not a fan of GNOME since 2008 (I guess you can check my recent comments…) I concede you can see the (visual) direction they’re trying to follow with Adwaita UI and trying to make it cohesive and coherent. Something I wish other DEs did that religiously, like Xfce, Enlightenment, even KDE itself, LXQt or you-name-it.
Still I think the problem with Adwaita is not that it’s ugly or something (I’d say more that it is highly opinionated, as it has become the full GNOME experience - either you like it as it is and it fits you like a glove, or you have to use something else because there’s no point in between), but a couple things even worse than that - (1) the serious issues it has brought to accessibility, i.e. not being able to tell with full certainty what is a button and what it is not in a toolbar, and (2) doing awful things in usability and UX for the sake of “convergence”. Like putting the primary action (“open” or “save” buttons) of dialogs in the exact same spot where you’d find the close button in every else window. Why is that? Yes, because “convergence”. On desktop.
All in all the hate towards Adwaita could be that it’s allegedly a visible symptom of how GNOME has so much power over GTK that Xfce and co are doing black magic trying to get rid of it for their development. I’ve just read rumors so don’t quote me on this, but I’d believe it can be true.
As much as I sympathise with developers over headaches caused by themeing, I believe users (myself included) would be less up-in-arms about it if applications were less ugly by default. And boy howdy is libadwaita ugly as sin.
I’d be perfectly willing to tolerate a mismatched system, if the individual components looked at least okay. Like I’m not going to get e.g. steam or discord to match an e.g. Windows 9x theme, and I’m mostly okay with that because they aren’t horrible to look at. But, say, File Roller? Absolutely not. Horribly ugly.
Each to their own.
Gnome with GTK4 +
adw-gtk3looks far cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than Plasma + Breeze, IMO.Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and though I’m not a fan of GNOME since 2008 (I guess you can check my recent comments…) I concede you can see the (visual) direction they’re trying to follow with Adwaita UI and trying to make it cohesive and coherent. Something I wish other DEs did that religiously, like Xfce, Enlightenment, even KDE itself, LXQt or you-name-it.
Still I think the problem with Adwaita is not that it’s ugly or something (I’d say more that it is highly opinionated, as it has become the full GNOME experience - either you like it as it is and it fits you like a glove, or you have to use something else because there’s no point in between), but a couple things even worse than that - (1) the serious issues it has brought to accessibility, i.e. not being able to tell with full certainty what is a button and what it is not in a toolbar, and (2) doing awful things in usability and UX for the sake of “convergence”. Like putting the primary action (“open” or “save” buttons) of dialogs in the exact same spot where you’d find the close button in every else window. Why is that? Yes, because “convergence”. On desktop.
All in all the hate towards Adwaita could be that it’s allegedly a visible symptom of how GNOME has so much power over GTK that Xfce and co are doing black magic trying to get rid of it for their development. I’ve just read rumors so don’t quote me on this, but I’d believe it can be true.
I think some of the issues with downstream projects could be fixed if we would just create some dialog between projects
Oh, there used to be. Then Gnome got so opinionated they wouldn’t listen. They pissed everybody off, and here we are.
steam is fully themable btw
Not exactly. It was far more in the past.