Gnome developers ask not to use themes in their applications

A group of independent Linux application developers wrote open letter, asking the Gnome community to stop using themes in their applications.

The letter is addressed to the maintainers of distributions that embed their own GTK themes and icons instead of the default ones. Many well-known distributions use their themes and icon sets to give the system a unified style, highlight their brand and give users a special experience. But sometimes you have to pay for this with unexpected errors and strange application behavior.

Developers recognize that the need to "stand out" is good, but you need to achieve this goal in some other way.

The main technical problem with GTK "teming" is that there is no API for GTK themes, only hacks and custom style sheets - there is no guarantee that a given theme won't break anything.

“We are tired of having to do extra work for configurations that we never intended to support,” the letter says.

Also, developers are wondering why "teming" is not done for all other applications.

“You don't do the same with Blender, Atom, Telegram or other third party apps. The fact that our applications use GTK does not mean that we accept that they are replaced without our knowledge,” the letter continues.

To sum up, developers are asked not to change their applications with third-party themes.

“This is why we respectfully ask the Gnome community not to embed third-party themes in our applications. They are built and tested against the original Gnome style sheet, icons and fonts, and this is how they should look in users' distributions."

Will the Gnome community listen to the words of the developers? Time will show.

Letter

Source: linux.org.ru