For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it.
Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks. And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough.
And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They didn't.
But why Qt/KDE developers don't lose their minds ? Either GTK theming is broken or the GTK app developers are not using it correctly or GNOME devs are assholes and really.really want to force their branding and vision. The above OR is not exclusive so it could be all 3 things.
I develop GTK3 apps. Theme breakage is generally a very real concern, as it usually points towards an issue with either
a. The usage/implementation of widgets in the application
or
b. The stylesheet the end user is implimenting
In either instance, the solution is very simple and within arms reach. It will always make more sense to encourage robust development practices over building fragile application stacks.
The don't theme my app people were complaining about their bug trackers being full of theme-related issues. Instead of just setting up a filter rule in their tracker so they could ignore those issues, they decided to go super draconian and remove theming for the entire desktop.
That disproportionate response to what comes down to an organizational shortcoming on their end made people upset, I'm not sure what they expected.
Note that they don't care about the themes their end users pick, though. You can theme your app just fine. They just want operating systems using their software (with their logos, trademarks and support links) to stop shipping their custom themes by default.
They just don't want Canonical or Fedora to ship a theme that makes all applications that didn't come bundled look like shit. If you like the Windows 95 Hotdog Stand theme, you can configure that and everybody probably agrees that that's great. If you inflict that pain upon yourself, that's your problem.
The current "solution" to themes breaking applications is to just not follow the system theme any longer. Everything gets packaged with a hardcoded theme in a sandboxed environment and you'll just have to live with that.
Now you know why the application developers are so loud and angry. We can’t have nice things because distributions shipped broken default configurations, and that’s messed up.
Don't say "the application developers" like we're all one person. There are multiple GTK developers in this thread that don't care what distros ship with: this is exclusively a GNOME complaint. Don't drag the rest of us into this.
So what? Why should they continue to support some minor feature if it costs them a lot of resources and they think it's not worth it because it doesn't really fit their project?
If you have a feature that is used by one customer out of thousands but it's causing problems at every update you push out. It might be better to remove the feature and fire the customer, than to keep supporting it no matter what.
honestly i would rather remove the ability of developers to make shitty controls and widgets. GUIs either ask you for some set of data or display it to you. Weve had a basic set of controls that work great for decades now. Im all for a platform that just requires the use of those and maximizes the ability if users to theme away.
Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks. And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough.
And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They didn't.