But I do take issue with attacking developers who write applications for free, and contribute to the Linux ecosystem, for making a reasonable request to platform developers.

It is unreasonable to expect each end user to build their own custom themes, it makes far more sense for distros to do the work once.

> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

Just not with the same vehemence as its message directed at distros.

This all seems like a huge issue made about nothing on consequence

If the letter was aimed at end users, that qualifier would have been redundant. Therefore the letter is not aimed at end users.

I understand that the devs do not want to be responsible for bugs stemming from broken themes, but this is the wrong solution. Ultimately the solution is a better theme API, not this which would essentially stop custom themes all together for most end users.

In other comments people argue that this isn't aimed at end users, but end users would of course also be impacted from this.

I don't see a good technical solution here, but I see two social ones: a) developers of FLOSS must understand they're writing software that can and will be modified and re-released by others, sometimes individuals and sometimes organized groups (like people making Linux distributions); and b) users need to understand that if they have a problem with their software, they should reach out to people from whom they got that software for support. If you got a program from developer's home page, you should contact them directly. If you got it from your distro, then distro maintainers should be your first line of support.

(Also c), some users won't understand b), and forwarding support requests to appropriate people is just part of publishing FLOSS.)

If themes are so important to you, pick your app based on that criteria. If you think an app is garbage because it doesn’t theme well, fork it and write a better version yourself.

That is an unfair inference because the author of the post explicitly says otherwise. To the extent he is speaking to you, he is only saying "thar be dragons" and that he will not explicitly support your use of a theme—therefore you should file any theme-induced bugs with the theme author and not with him.

How is releasing software under a license and asking people not do things allowed by that license reasonable?

If GTK3 still does not support theming, that explains why theming causes issues. In which case it would be better to implement proper theming support because stopping distributions from theming clearly doesn't work.

Oh yes, people have always done it, via one hack or another, and as long as it was more of a "for people who really want to fiddle" it wasn't that much of an issue.

But now expectations have risen, people expect more solid behaviour and look/feel from their apps, and distros routinely have quite different GTK themes.

Good question. Why did I write things like the following if you don't read it anyway?

> One way for the user to express their choice is to choose a distribution whose theme they like.