Bonum Certa Men Certa

GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 25, 2023

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

Roy mentioned that GTK is a lot worse now than it used to be.

Since I switched to KDE and stopped hitting myself over the head with all of that GNOME stupidity which made using my PC very unpleasant, I’ve identified maybe a few applications that make any substantial usage of GNOME that I actually still have.

You should probably just remove as many as you can, honestly.

The attitude of GTK “developers” is very user-hostile.

Consider “Stop Theming My App” where users are basically threatened that unless the themes for GTK stop, there might be “technical measures” put into place to stop you.

Like, what the Hell even is this shit? It’s my computer. Go away.

The user is ALWAYS right.

Even when the user is wrong, they are still right.

Any THING the user wants to do with THEIR OWN COMPUTER is right.

We already have a word for an operating system where the theming system is “protected” from the user making “unauthorized” changes to it. (Unless they HACK the dll.)

It’s called Windows.

It has two “modes”. “Light” and “Dark”, like GNOME does.

And “Dark” is one more option than they had before.

KDE has all kinds of themes.

You want to install an ugly pink one with ponies everywhere and “What in God’s name is that font?”, you can. Knock yourself out.

Themes are a work of art. The user stares at the monitor, sometimes for hours a day, and they deserve to have something that doesn’t look like garbage. Adwaita is a very boring theme that gets old fast. It does not look good at all.

It’s more of this “Let’s make GNOME look like a stupid Mac and shove our branding in your face.” mentality, than an actual theme.

Some of the KDE themes, look rather nice. You can make KDE look like anything because there’s no Hitlerian control freaks creating a Web site that probably nobody but me even knew about, yelling at users for applying a theme. And lying about how the “concept has always been broken”.

That’s what it is, a lie.

Themes worked FINE in GNOME 2, the last good series of GNOME.

I had Nimbus and Nimbus-Dark, from Solaris, not this pale gray nonsense called “Adwaita” that looks very “Oh that’s a nice shade of gray. I think I’ll go get some mayo on white bread and watch C-SPAN.”

The only way to deal with these arrogant GNOME and GTK “developers” as a user is switch to KDE or LxQt or something and get rid of as many GTK applications as you can.

KDE and Qt have an extensive list of good applications, or at least KDE and Qt bindings to programs you must have like LibreOffice, or Breeze-GTK to make Firefox and SeaMonkey look good.

The more GTK applications you get rid of, the less they control you.

They can’t control a toolkit they don’t develop.

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