Theming GNOME possible again?

to me it looks like…

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2_4bsem504

old news :wink:
and yea… there is a lot rumors when Gnome does what Gnome does now for already a long time love it or hate it… it is what Gnome is now. a shell going out of the way and having curtains.

:shell: :window:

What i do still see a problem is all the mixup with gtk versions.
Bigger problem for other DEs using gtk… and even base on GNOME…

Budgie p.e. and XFCE4 …

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I think they made good progress porting packages to GTK4 in Gnome 44beta. :thinking:

inside GNOME universe yes… but other Desktops start having everything in the mix now… like XFCE4 have some apps already gtk4 but also gtk3… and on Budgie we need to interchange files to nemo to not have it out of the theme…

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I think it’s not a gtk version issue (if the theme support gtk2/3/4), but more if the application use CSD (client side decoration) or not.

For example, an app using CSD :

another not using it :

The window theme set with the xfwm4 settings manager is the one with rectangular buttons. The first app use the window theme associated with the gtk theme.

I’ve been given my KDE Plasma desktop a lot of love lately, neglecting my GNOME desktop. So yesterday I decided to log into GNOME. I’m running whatever the latest GNOME version is for EndeavourOS stable.

It’s a f’cking mess! I use a mix of GTK, QT, and other toolkit apps; just like every other NORMAL desktop Linux user. Just about every other app I ran had different header bars/windows decorations! No two CSD apps were the same! I tried in Tweaks to set a common decoration for all apps, but the decoration would be bigger on the GTK apps and smaller on the QT apps. What was even worse was the major difference in look between GTK apps with different version numbers (GTK 2, 3, 4, etc)! Of course there is no easy, all in one spot, way to fix this mess! Do GNOME developers like constantly shooting their users in the foot?

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Undoubtedly :roll_eyes:

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yea i mean in KDE we have set up to theme GTK stuff but GNOME does not have anything general to do that… could be done automatically but it is simply ignored… same for non-CSD apps… the idea is that developers should handle this and as long as they do not it will stay messy…

how this? gnome does simply not set theming at all for gtk “legacy” apps they will use adwaita as a fallback but will not follow dark mode p.e you can set it manually in gnome-tweaks yes… but why this should be needed?

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I was talking about Xfce, but if I want real consistency, I can replace gtk3 with gtk3-classic which remove CSD on all applications. Adwaita is the default theme for Xfce and gtk3/4, if you use another theme you have to check how it looks with different gtk versions.

The “funny” thing is on one hand, we have some users who want to continue modifying the look of Gnome (Gradience), and on the other hand, some developers, looking for consistency, who want to stick to the default, unmodified theme (stopthemingmy.app).

For us experienced long term linux users all of this has a story and we can fix almost everything to our likings… but for the joe average user ? this is all a mess…
Simply 3 steps to much.
It is looking like there is not only QT and GTK it is more like there is GTK2/3/4 and now even QT5/6
6 plus some others in addition…

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aur/gradience 0.4.1_patch1-1 (+8 0.30) 
    Change the look of Adwaita, with ease

can be used too :wink:

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