You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes).

Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.

Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.

Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.

Or putting the scroll bar back, or getting rid of the awful client side decorations.

This attitude is why we can no longer have stuff that doesn't only come in "light theme" or "dark theme". I consider this a regression. Let me theme my damn computer the way I want. It's called a Personal computer for a reason.

It is silly that dark mode isn't regarded the same as just switching themes. Forcing its adoption however breaks dependency on non-themable components so its popularity is still a net benefit.

There's a difference between "we'll test and support two color schemes" and "we'll design ui with parametrised colors, shapes and text sizes which can adjust to any change and still be usable". If we settle on bright/dark/colorblind mode selectors that everyone expects to be supported, I'm happy. I've seen themes in the past and there was always a few apps which just can't resize elements in the expected way, or the backgrounds don't tile correctly, or ...

Ok, then don't support it. But don't patronise me. Don't tell me I couldn't possibly wield the power of recolouring a piece of UI without hurting myself, and deny me the chance to even try.

No one can deny you anything with FOSS. Go ahead, edit everything, just please don't complain to the developers that something broke because of that.

But libadwaita hasn't taken away the ability to try? You can still load custom themes through GTK_THEME and specific CSS through ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to have any measure of control at all. It's just that I'm frustrated that we had infinitely more capable theming system already in place, and it was broken.

I want customizable color schemes and fonts and sizes. It's nice as a user to pick full-on custom themes. Sadly even though Qt is based around theming, I had to turn off theming for semi-customized controls (colored sliders) to make them render correctly on Windows and Linux Breeze/Fusion. And it's more work to verify my app looks good across OSes when QButtonBar and QFormLayout change appearance on different OSes. So finding a good solution is nontrivial.

I'm quite sure you could change system colors willy nilly in OS 8. It was great fun. I miss that part - the feeling of having "your own" system.

Since customization where pretty standard back then, it feels like product managers pushing their "vision" rather than technical difficulties preventing that nowadays.

Kaleidoscope and later on Appearance Manager in Classic Mac OS were so much fun. No OS theming system I’ve encountered since have been as capable as those were.

Ye I wonder what fantastic APIs were actually exposed. I remember some 3rd party screen saver I had. Where like Goofy peeked out of folders and Donald Duck was cleaning up some file mess. I mean, how could you even program that?

I think it was on the real desktop, not some bitmap, but not too sure.

If not for scrollbars color, I certainly dislike the macOS GUI for its straightjacket approach. (Also, poor window management.)

I wish Gnome folks did not keep on copying it more and more. I see why it's easier to do, but KDE somehow manages.

(And if one thinks that Apple UX design can't go wrong, remember Macbooks from a couple of years ago.)

I get what you’re saying but I find GNOME more evocative of iPadOS than macOS. It’s almost exactly what you would get if you tried to create a desktop environment using an iPad as a starting point.

macOS still has several traditional desktop affordances that are eschewed by GNOME, like full menus (not just hamburger junk drawer menus) and customizable toolbars.

I switched from Mac to Linux (in 2008-2009) because I could understand it and make it my own, among other things with theming.

I do say that. The light-grey on top of light-grey theme means a lot of times the only way to tell which is the foreground window is by looking for the 3 colored dots.

MacOS at least lets users choose the accent color: https://osxdaily.com/2020/07/24/change-accent-color-mac/