To my view of the world, the reasonable grain of truth in the article is "Don't break our apps when you theme them to match distro". A perfectly reasonable request, and stance that most could support without caveat.

Which is then thoroughly buried by a point of view that feels the app is the only arbiter, and tries to justify that on consistency of brand, icons not representing what the developer wishes etc, and that even individual user customisation is a big favour - an unsupported edge case.

What of the users?

It's reasonable to expect an app to both allow, and to work correctly with any theming built into the platform or distro. Bugs may be on either side. I concede it's mainly the major platforms that have done most to take away choices here, so you can no longer download new iconsets - to transform everything into ST:TNG or whatever. Where a distro seeks to theme everything it's the one app that won't, for brand experience, or developer wishes - that now sticks out like a sore thumb.

That is to be regretted, as much as platforms removing ability to build a custom night mode or extreme low contrast theme, or even add some slight 3d back to Windows. It's the end user who loses out to a worse experience or usability each and every time.

Good thing theming doesn't modify the software. It's reasonable to expect a developer to support software being used in an environment that does not 100% match what they use (to the extent it's reasonable to expect support in the first place).

> Good thing theming doesn't modify the software.

Changing the UI changes the software from the user perspective.

That's why they're users and not developers.