I couldn't disagree more. If the user wants the intended experience, they will not apply a different theme for your app. The whole reason a user has applied a different theme on your app is because they disagree with your choices and that's totally fine.
What's next, asking Mozilla to take down user style sheets and extensions that restyle web apps?
This article is antithetical to the whole cultural foundation that GNOME builds on, without which there would probably not be an open source desktop ecosystem to build apps for.
I strongly urge the authors to take in the arguments of the top comments and reevaluate their positions.
And you know what? The more you enable and facilitate customization, the better and richer will the options provided by the community be. I can see how the argument makes sense for particular distributions like Elementary OS and maybe Linux Mint that are aiming at a unified experience for novice users. I really hope other distro maintainers don't pay attention.
They're specifically talking to distros in the letter, not end users. If you want to install your own custom theme, fine. But if you're a distro shipping a custom theme, when it breaks a 3rd party app, the app gets the blame, not the distro.
> On a platform level, we believe GTK should stop forcing a single stylesheet on all apps by default. Instead of apps having to opt out of this by hardcoding a stylesheet, they should use the platform stylesheet unless they opt in to something else.
This is what I take issue with as a user. A major reason why I prefer GTK is exactly because I can get a homogenous look without having to tweak every single app individually. There are definitely issues with the way this is handled (and I'm TBH still confused about squaring Qt and GTK styles), but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This article is antithetical to the whole cultural foundation that GNOME builds on, without which there would probably not be an open source desktop ecosystem to build apps for.
I strongly urge the authors to take in the arguments of the top comments and reevaluate their positions.
And you know what? The more you enable and facilitate customization, the better and richer will the options provided by the community be. I can see how the argument makes sense for particular distributions like Elementary OS and maybe Linux Mint that are aiming at a unified experience for novice users. I really hope other distro maintainers don't pay attention.