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11mo ago

Gnome's Adwaita team is breaking icon compatibility

cullmann.io

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11mo ago

The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO spec, breaking e.g. KDE apps

cullmann.io /posts/kate-and-icons/

KDE @lemmy.kde.social

Christoph Cullmann @lemmy.kde.social

11mo ago

The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec breaking KDE applications on Fedora 40 Workstation and Co.

cullmann.io /posts/kate-and-icons/

74 comments

Reading the bug report about all that ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/issues/288 ), it's crazy to see how the gnome dev (Red Hat employee) replies to the issue. He completely ignores the issue in the beginning, then that he doesn't care to follow the spec because it's "old", and yet, he still advertises to the OS as an fdo theme, so OSes ship with it. He's hurting non-gnome apps, and he simply doesn't seem to care about it. To me, this shows a person who simply doesn't care about ecosystem.
- I have defended Red Hat a fair bit over the past year. Their level of contribution to the community is a big reason why.
  It is clear though that their prominence comes with a downside in the paternal and authoritative way that their employees present themselves. Design choices and priorities are made with an emphasis on what works for and what is required for Red Hat and the software they are going to ship. The impact on the wider community is not always considered and too often actively dismissed.
  Even some of the Linux centrism perceived in Open Source may really be more about Red Hat. For example, GNOME insists on Systemd. Both projects are dominated by Red Hat. There have been problems with their stewardship of other projects.
  To me, this is a much bigger problem than all the license hand-waving we saw before.
  
  Gnome uses systemd because it is easier and better. Why would you reinvent the wheel.
- If you look at every interaction with a Redhat developer in the context of them having KPIs / set work to do. The responses to non critical issues / MRs makes a lot more sense.
  Not saying that it makes it any better tho.
- I was getting really pissed seeing that Pointieststick had to explain the same fucking thing OVER AND OVER again. I don't know if the gnome dev in question is stupid or just trolling.
- Gnome is the Mac of the Linux desktop world.
  Nothing new here, Gnone losted the plot with Gnome 3.
- If it's sabotage, it would be kind of caring.

Gnome devs being gnome devs.

- Is being a massive cunt a requirement if you want to be a GNOME developer?
  Yep.
  
  It's in the SOW.
- Familiarity breeds contempt, give it some time and I'm sure cosmic will have its share of haters too. There's hundreds of gnome devs, and all you're seeing are clickbait blogposts like these made to stir up the pot. Go check out the discussions on discourse, matrix, or even gitlab to see what they're actually like.
  
  The problem isn't that every gnome dev is bad - not by a long shot. The problem is that there are just enough gnome devs in just the right (wrong?) positions who have an "our way or the highway" philosophy that it causes problems not just for people trying to use GNOME, but for people (such as the Kate developers) who are trying to give their users a good experience.
  And by being the default in so many distros, GNOME has enough clout that if they choose to abandon a standard, many people will change to whatever GNOME does, making their applications worse for people on other desktops.
  In the end it's not too dissimilar to the problems created by the dominance of Chromium and Windows. The biggest difference IMO is that Google are actually more conciliatory towards others than the GNOME team are in many cases. Which is kinda crazy given how much Google can throw their weight around on the web.
  
  I've interacted directly with gnome devs and they live with their heads in the sand.
- That's because Cosmic is made by really cool people at System76 who actually care about their users/customers and the broader open source Linux desktop ecosystem
- I can't wait to throw it on my laptop. I hope the tiling is highly customizable because I need something I can throw on a laptop, not update in a while and still have it not break when I finally do.
  I like Hyperland but it does break the config every once and a while.

I really love GNOME but the developers keep doing shit like this and I don't get why. Their reasoning for why they won't allow custom accent colors and only predefined ones was also stupid and then they just said that if people keep asking for custom colors, they won't implement it at all.
- That's wild, flat out telling the community they're going to refuse to implement something if they want it enough to ask for it
  I won't presume how easy or hard implementing that would be, but I have a hard time believing it would be so significant that this stance makes any sense at all
  
  The reasoning for only allowing predefined colors was that, apparently, developers need to be able to test against every color and that Android's Material You is a total mess. I disagree with both of that, Material You seems to be working quite fine (I've also made apps myself) and I don't get what developers would need to test with accent colors. I couldn't voice my opinion tho cause then the whole thing would've been canned.
  
  The Macos of the Linux ecosystem.
- I never really gave gnome a chance until I came across bluefin recently. I was pleasantly surprised but the lack of customizability always drives me away in the long run. Im not against opinionated design, their opinion on how things should be just seems to differ from my own.

Breaking changes is what drove me to switch to KDE.
- I’ve had periods where I was switching back and forth, but your entire shell having breaking issues on every minor patch is unacceptable. If they’re also going to break other apps with that, i don’t know how i would recommend it
  
  If Linux is to go mainstream I feel like KDE needs to be the default Desktop experience on distros. The Windows-like style is what the majority of people recognize and are familiar with and the KDE developers seems to care a lot about their userbase.
  New users already has a lot to deal with and learn when it comes it Linux. They don't need their desktop environment to work against them too.

Gnome to Gnome users: Why are they constantly shooting themselves in the foot?
Gnome to a Xfce (me) or KDE user: hey y'all come quick they're doing something stupid again

XFCE users looking around worriedly – can you please not mess with GTK? … please?
…
…
so … um, I’ve been hearing nice things about LXQT lately?
- This is Libadwaita not GTK3
  
  It's GTK4, libadwaita is just their really weird theming stuff, but the UI toolkit is still called GTK, and version 4 of it forces you to use libadwaita. You can't change the theme, because Gnome is actually user-hostile.
  
  sigh

Gnome breaking shit for no reason as always =P
Seriously, this is as simple as keeping symbolic links for compatibility, but they won't do it because it maybe might possibly lead to issues.
- I can't believe they've been doing this since the very start of the Gnome project. I stopped using it long, long ago (1.1) when they dropped their nice and configurable WM for something you couldn't do anything with. Nice to see they haven't changed a bit.
- You summarised it nicely why gnome people frustrate me

Gnome devs to Gnome users: get gnomed you gnomes
- I got gnomed

As someone who much prefers gnome for my desktop this shit is so frustrating. I'm kinda just waiting and watching to see if they ruin another thing I like about it :(
Its fucking exhausting

- But they need to use MY DE!!! /s
- You could just not use it

Fork and stay at the old version until it's fixed?
- Again? Aren't Mate and Cinnamon enough Gnome forks already?
  
  We fork until there's nothing else!
  
  Wait, I remember Mate being a Gnome2 fork but Cinnamon? The more you know... :o

More closed and non-customizable systems are much more stable. I guess that's what GNOME devs are trying to achieve and I don't really mind it. We have other options for those who need customization. The most used and mainstream one really should be focused on stability. Though I don't think anyone tried breaking icons before. It's a bit too much. The app devs will need to make multiple icons for different DEs which is a good thing but shouldn't be forced like that
- If stability was their aim, they wouldn't be breaking stuff all the time...
  
  I would argue that gnome is pretty stable in recent years. Don't remember when was the last time something crashed.
  This might would probably be true for Extensions.
  KDE has been unstable for me on Wayland in the past.
- The standards are supposed to be the stable thing. If some part of GNOME advertises itself as following a specific standard then it should remain stable in following that standard.
  
  That is a misconception that 99% of the devs don't understand. Sometimes you do need major changes that break stuff to upgrade the base. GNOME started doing it recently. Keeping old bases for a very long time makes them bloated, hacky, slow and unstable
- Don't advertise the theme as standards compliant then.
- Ahh, the old "it's too difficult for us."
  If the gnome devs are so incompetent, why don't they just get another job?
- I guess that's what GNOME devs are trying to achieve
  They should strive for something like FLTK then, it has much smaller codebase.

74 comments