[HN Gopher] The end of the nice GTK button ___________________________________________________________________ The end of the nice GTK button Author : MartijnBraam Score : 75 points Date : 2022-03-24 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.brixit.nl) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.brixit.nl) | SkeuomorphicBee wrote: | I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it | will be missed. | | > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random | word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button | they can press to invoke an action. | | This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern | designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which | encoded a lot if visual information (the clickability, the | current status), but in many cases nothing was added to supplant | the loss of those visual cues, so now it is just a label (or a | label in a white or grey box) and there is no way of knowing if | it is clickable or its current status. | HeckFeck wrote: | I'm also really not sold on those new "tabs" which are just | text with an underlined colour. It's low effort and dreadfully | unclear. I can only vaguely guess what they are based on their | upper placement, but what's to really distinguish that from a | menu? or just a descriptive label? | | I don't like saying this because I want Linux desktop apps to | have every success, but these small and pointless frustrations | kill my enthusiasm. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Backstory: https://stopthemingmy.app | naoqj wrote: | You can't get any more arrogant than this. | MereInterest wrote: | Wow, that's definitely something. Implying that tinkering with | the low level aspects of a system are acceptable, but don't you | dare apply a different stylesheet, because adjusting colors is | delicate work that shouldn't ever be done by anybody but the | developer. | tshaddox wrote: | > The dark theme, while not officially supported as a normal | application theme, works absolutely brilliantly and is a great | example of how to design a dark theme. | | There are only three small screenshots of UI in the dark theme, | but to me it looks very clearly like a naive "invert all the | design token colors and call it a day" implementation. | phendrenad2 wrote: | You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You | can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make | a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI | design that the majority chose). | | That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values | consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, | and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number | of benefits, such as a unified visual style across all apps, and | an easy to use internationalization/localization subsystem. | malermeister wrote: | libadwaita is very unfortunate in general and the zeal of the | GNOME community has been very off-putting | naoqj wrote: | Can you elaborate? Especially about the first part | smoldesu wrote: | They're probably referring to the functional regressions it | made with it's first official release, and how it furthers | the idea of GNOME/GTK lock-in. libadwaita has made it | extremely difficult to package cross-platform desktop apps, | especially while appearing native on different desktops (eg. | adopting the native Breeze look on KDE while retaining the | native Adwaita look on GNOME). The lack of this functionality | at launch (and subsequent empty promises of a replacement) | have rightfully left a bad taste in some people's mouth, | particularly now that much of the GNOME leadership denies | that this is a problem in the first place. | Gualdrapo wrote: | I don't think adwaita is that bad, but rather feel like they | _yet_ have to polish some small details. | | Like the interline spacing on things, sometimes it feels | inconsistent. KDE menus, for example, have a nice spacing - | but GTK ones feel cramped. And those submenus that they place | on things like the top-right menu on the panel have different | line heights. | | Some other third party apps, for example that mail client I | tried the other day (it wasn't evolution, but I can't | remember its name) had serious layout issues. libadwaita was | supposed to fix those inconsistencies and make devs lifes | happier, but... | | And speaking of buttons and top right corners, I will never, | ever get why they place the open/save/select dialog buttons | in the top right corner of the dialog. Where you are used to | find the 'close' button. Why? | pmontra wrote: | Wait ten years. New people will start working, old people will | move on to other things. The new people will change stuff, mostly | for the sake of it as it always happens, and one of the results | will be less flat interfaces. Old people will be infuriated by | the change. Very old people will rejoice but also complain that | those UIs are not as good as the really old ones. New people will | shrug them away and keep changing stuff mostly for the sake of it | as it always happens. | zozbot234 wrote: | It's already happening, new interfaces from both Apple (see Big | Sur/Monterey) and Google (Material design) are noticeably less | "flat" and going back to 3d effects for "active" widgets. The | effects are much as seen in GTK+ 3 - just subtle enough to not | look overly confusing when compared to a totally "flat" | screenshot, but still helpful to unfamiliar users. | mikl wrote: | Yeah, the new GTK4 UI looks like a clone of Apple's UIKit with a | worse font. Shame that Gnome is following the trend of flat and | boring UIs. | smoldesu wrote: | All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3's | interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more | abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique | experience. Even if it didn't work in _every_ context, I | appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications | and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a | wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK3. Curlew | packed all of the important features of Handbrake /FFMPEG into a | more streamlined, simple package. Foliate took e-book reading | into the 21st century. So many amazing apps were enabled with | this switch, and even though it's still a second-class toolkit, | it was my guilty pleasure on Linux. | | In comes GTK4. Much like the article alludes to, the elegant and | simple shadow of interactive elements goes _poof_. Developers | spend hundreds of hours crusading against letting people use | third-party themes, just so they can simplify and reduce UI | elements to a nigh-unusable pulp. Developing with GTK4 is a | nightmare. Using GTK4 is a pain in the ass. For christs sake, | there was a devastating font-rendering glitch that existed for | more than _ten months_ after the first GTK4 release that was | ignored in lieu of simplifying buttons, developing a new forced | stylesheet and telling people "don't theme our apps!" Whenever I | take this up with a maintainer, they immediately take it | personally and write out a litany of reasons why I'm wrong and | why I'm not allowed to disagree. The priorities here are almost | unbelievably misaligned, I've pinned my GTK packages at the last | GTK3 release and await some sort of admission of failure. | | I simply can't take it anymore. These are the people making | desktop Linux miserable, and I frankly feel no remorse watching | their attempts at "simplifying" the ecosystem crash and burn. | MartijnBraam wrote: | This is exactly how I feel about it. The sad thing is that if | the whole gnome ecosystem burns down I'd have to use the | alternatives that I like even less. | | I'm just not designing gtk4 apps untill it's actually better | than gtk3 | smoldesu wrote: | Definitely. Keep on trucking, I'm developing GTK3 apps right | alongside you! | von_lohengramm wrote: | The font rendering on that example of "the perfect button" is | rather atrocious. It's kind of sad that Windows is (was?) the | last bastion of serviceable font rendering. | smoldesu wrote: | If you think that looks bad, wait until you see what GTK4 was | stuck looking like for the first 10 months of it's life cycle: | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 | tomduncalf wrote: | Interesting, I always disliked Windows font rendering and much | prefer the was MacOS renders fonts. I couldn't explain why, but | I know many graphic designers who say the same. I guess it's a | matter of taste! | von_lohengramm wrote: | Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you | ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse | than anything else. | mikl wrote: | For some value of "normal". 4K (or better) monitors have | long since become the choice for most of those who cares | about how font rendering looks. | | After a decade of "retina" screens, I'm ruined, I can't | stand the look of anti-aliased fonts, whether Windows, | Linux or macOS. | jabbany wrote: | This. | | The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these | days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) | displays is painful. | naoqj wrote: | I agree that the defaults are atrocious, but freetype can be | configured and the options are limitless. | von_lohengramm wrote: | Linux font rendering has come a long way in the last couple | years. With TrueType2 and Windows fonts taken from an | installer ISO (and not the ancient corefonts package), you | can actually get some overall mostly okay font rendering. | Every now and again, the hinting bugs out and it looks | unreadable, but its far better than the olden days. | mholt wrote: | The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and | buttons baffles me. | | For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for | "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out | it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and | put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture- | only icon that I've never seen before. | | MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons along the top of native apps | like Finder don't have text anymore, the buttons are flat without | borders, and the icons are thin lines. How is anyone supposed to | know what they do?? | | In most UIs (Apple and Android in particular), I can't tell when | one of those on-off switches is ON or OFF. Is the dark side ON or | OFF? Maybe the light side is ON. Oh, it's the opposite when Dark | Mode is enabled; great. | | Bring back text. Bring back nice buttons. | HeckFeck wrote: | This is why I have reverted to the CLI whenever possible. | | There's something deeply assuring knowing that I don't have to | relearn my whole workflow every few months when the trends | change. ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. | Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent. | | All I want is to get work done the way I want, and I've found | the CLI is increasingly the path of least resistance. | Nextgrid wrote: | > ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even | the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent. | | Those command-line tools don't have any "engagement" | opportunities nor are there bloated teams of product managers | & designers having to justify their salaries by reworking | them for no good reason. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | In macOS, you can actually right-click many header bars (like | Finder) and choose "Icon and Text" instead of "Icon" for what | shows. | mholt wrote: | I do this, but I do not want to do this. | | Also it looks funky. The padding is messed up and the text | doesn't fit. | duskwuff wrote: | There's also an accessibility setting (under the "Display" | section) for "Show toolbar button shapes". | ggm wrote: | This. Material design relies on the browser hint to inform you | the mouse/pointer has moved to an active element. Viewed with | no focus on an active element, how are you meant to tell which | pane of flat colour is a pressable, actionable element? | | It looks great in print. It doesn't respect the modality of use | for an online world. | | I'm tempted to think we have to go to browser vendors and ask | them to make <blink> happen.. | goosedragons wrote: | I ended up reverting back to the old context menu. Those icons | are annoying to parse and I have a tendency to look down each | row as 20+ years of context menus has taught. And having so | many options tucked an extra click away. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | 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. | simion314 wrote: | 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. | smoldesu wrote: | 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. | malermeister wrote: | 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. | MartijnBraam wrote: | I handle "random theme breaking my app" as a valid bug report, | it's not that hard. | | It's either something I'd have to fix in my app or fixed in | that theme. Just ignoring the situation is just a shitty | response. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | https://stopthemingmy.app | MartijnBraam wrote: | Yes I'm aware of it | [deleted] | lnxg33k1 wrote: | --- Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even | hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I | instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get | the chance to give some feedback. Apparently not liking flat | themes makes me a madman in this world. Why am I not allowed to | even have opinions about the look of the operating system I'm | using? --- | | But to be honest, isn't it one of the recurring point of people | running away from gnome? Haven't they just proceeded going ahead | not listening to anyone? | azinman2 wrote: | So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional | designers behind it. | | What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich | SV person hasn't thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig | design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even | available (if he'd take the project). But even going thru a site | like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To | me it would be a more impressive portfolio piece for a young | designer to properly design GTK/Gnome and put it out there for | the world. What is stopping this? It can't be caring with the | history of people sharing their themes. Is it just taste / money? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-24 23:00 UTC)