I’ve not actually built any themes so take these thoughts with a grain of salt, but my impression is that with GTK at least, most of the problems come down to CSS conflicts and libadwaita doing its own thing separate from GTK proper. It seems like a lot of GTK apps hardcode colors, fonts, etc instead of parameterizing too, which means they aren’t going to respond to theme changes correctly. All together these combine to produce a pretty spotty theming experience.

Things seem a bit better on the Qt side of things, but it suffers resolution scaling issues. Most KDE/Qt themes I’ve tried can’t draw correctly at non-integer scales.

Personally I think that CSS is actually pretty badly suited for the use case of desktop UI toolkit theming. It’s fine for one-off apps but quickly becomes a mess when it needs to be part of a larger more flexible system.

Its just an impossible problem.

Apps like to make very custom interfaces. All of CSS is great.

Platforms like consistency, so they maintain their own complex CSS.

Users like to customize everything, so CSS is powerful but will always break as its fighting the others.

More than apps liking to make custom interfaces, I think it’s more that companies like to try to make their UI into a brand, necessitating a high level of customization. If you look at the majority of FOSS software, even much of it that’s held in better regard by users (e.g. Krita), highly custom UI is considerably more unusual.

There’s not much that can be done about UI-as-branding unfortunately, but for everything else I believe that parameterization is the answer. Don’t hardcode colors, fonts, etc and instead favor framework-provided presets (like UIColor.systemBackground and UIFont.caption1 on iOS) wherever practical and that’ll for the most part make your app remain usable regardless of how the user’s themed their system, short of just using a badly made theme. This should be done anyway because it’s a huge boon to accessibility if the user can e.g. enable colorblind mode and have the reds and greens in apps adjust automatically because their devs were thoughtful enough to use Color.systemGreen and Color.systemRed instead of hardcoding #FF0000 and #008000.

libadwaita does this to a degree: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/1.6/css-...

I'm working on some Gtk/desktop stuff and keep coming back to the Gtk/Gnome/Wayland bug trackers where the Gtk people are constantly stonewalling ecosystem improvements. Urgency notifications, disabling client-side decorations, themeing, etc. Stuff like "well some programs put stuff in the titlebar, therefore we can't allow a hint for the ones that don't". The Catpuccin theme is very popular and they recently threw in the towel, just for the Gtk port.

I don't know if Qt is better but I've heard about 0 drama from them... I made a poll on reddit though and for some reason people (users) still prefer Gtk to Qt.

> I don't know if Qt is better but I've heard about 0 drama from them... I made a poll on reddit though and for some reason people (users) still prefer Gtk to Qt.

I think this is probably because GTK programs tend to sport UI designs that are nicer/friendlier and less “designed by a programmer”, even if they skew overly simple. Qt leans the other direction, with apps that are generally complete from a technical standpoint but have a good deal of room for improvement in UI design.

Incidentally I think this is also why distros centered around GTK-based DEs still dominate.

I'm pretty sure the reason for Gtk being way more common than Qt has more to do with inertia (way in the past Gtk's license was more desirable and wasn't until Qt4 that changed, so any programs before or around that time that were made in Gtk remained in Gtk even after Qt4) and language availability. Specifically for the latter, C is much easier to make bindings for and GObject provides functionality for doing it automatically, thus Gtk is available in many more languages whereas Qt's use of C++ is much harder to both make bindings and do it automatically. The end result is that Gtk is simply more widely available and so much more likely to be used by someone who doesn't want to use C or C++ (the main exception seems to be Python which has official high quality bindings for C++).

The UI designs are just a byproduct, there is nothing about Qt that makes it hard/impossible to have Gtk-like designs, but since Gtk is used by a lot of programmers, when encountering a program like those you mention, the chances are higher that it is written in Gtk than in Qt because more programmers use Gtk than Qt.

(note that this is specifically about Linux desktop applications, i think overall Qt is used more than Gtk outside Linux)

I had a stint with KDE cca 6 months ago, Gnome couldn't do fractional scaling for X11 apps on Wayland, this meant my IntelliJ was unusable (this was fixed since). So I switched for a few months - Plasma was just super glitchy, panes randomly collapse into 1px width, flicker, etc. And the UI looks thrown together, apps have Windows 9x/thrown together in Visual Basic RAD vibe.

I think OP described it pretty well - stock Gnome is actually a nice desktop environment, I prefer it to Windows, does not even come close to MacOS.

TBH i haven't used KDE Plasma much. I used to like KDE 3.5, then KDE 4 was a disaster that it took several releases after KDE 5 to stabilize (i remember trying KDE Neon, supposedly KDE's very own distro that should be rock solid for KDE - and i had severe visual glitches). But the last versions of KDE 5 and KDE 6 nowadays seems fine. Again, i'm not using it much, i mainly use Window Maker (X11) and use KDE Plasma only on my laptop as well as on my desktop when i want to try something in a more "windows-like" environment or as a different user (for default configurations, etc).

I can believe that KDE Plasma still has issues though, it seems some sort of bomb was thrown during KDE 4 times in the codebase and it still has to recover. Though if nothing else, i do use KDE apps outside of Plasma (Kate, Krita, Dolphin, Okular, Spectacle) and they all seem very solid.

I think Gtk+Gnome and Qt+Kde are being mixed here and it's creating some confusion.

After a parent said that Gnome looked better than Kde I looked it up and found a number of posts criticizing Kde design decisions (padding, etc). I fully believe the Gnome people have a better design decision. But I don't think that criticism applies to Qt itself, necessarily.

It’s not a perfect rule but I find that Qt apps tend to resemble KDE apps and have questionable design choices more often than not, even those that aren’t related to the KDE project in any way.

It’s consistent enough that it makes me wonder if maybe something about the tooling is partially to blame.

GTK theming was a mess long before libadwaita came along.

It's no secret that the GNOME/GTK guys _hate_ theming. So much so, that made an entire website for it: https://stopthemingmy.app/

The theming they dislike isn't the theming their users are doing. Their biggest issue is distros packaging their own theme, which can easily break an entire suit of applications without the user knowing it's because their distro decided to override the colours or mess with widths. As the page you linked says:

> 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.

Theming Gnome by editing the default style sheet is akin to distro theming the web by modifying Firefoz's default style sheet. Tons of websites will break in weird and interesting ways but the user won't know to blame the distro, because they never touched user.css or even know it's possible to change the default.

The same breakage also happens on KDE and Qt applications (and more, I have seen Eclipse launch with black text on a black background when dark mode is enabled) but the developers don't seem to care as much, or are less bothered by the false bug reports. I've also experienced the "this doesn't look anything like the screenshots" feeling because of the theme I have applied, but at least I know it's my own fault.

To be fair, this one is specially to address the issue of a distro theming an app, breaking it, and that leading to a bug report at the upstream even though it's the distro at fault.

If a user is willing to take responsibility for breakage and such, then I'm not sure the devs are against theming as such.

> 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.

personally I don't get it. If I wanted a macbook, I'd get a macbook. These things are cute and fun, ok, but do people actually want to use it?

I think it made substantially more sense in the 1990s.

For one, Gtk+ used to be advertised as a multi platform toolkit, with a port of GDK to Win32. Making Gtk+ widgets look like Win32 made sense for that.

Secondly, there were two groups of people using Linux and X11 in that era: one group who were exiles from commercial Unix, and another, faster growing group coming from Windows. For the former group, it was reasonable to want widgets to look more like Motif or Athena. The latter group wanted a more modern look, which could depart from old school Unix workstations.

In fact, the only change from your characterisation is that the toolkit has been renamed from Gtk+ to GTK. Here is an example of a current claim: "GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, and macOS." https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/overview.html

I think what has changed is user expecations; in the the 1990s, there was an expectation that programs should look like the native toolkit; whereas by now, it's even questionable whether there is a native toolkit on Windows (due to the range of choice, each of which a noticeably different in look and feel) and program-specific appearance is the norm on mobile and web applications. Nowadays, you could probably write a slightly customised Adwaita app for Windows and you'd get by more satisfactorily than if you wrote a plain GTK app and tried to theme it to modern Win32.

That's funny. Because I remember one of the changes from gtk-1.2 to gtk-2.0 (or maybe 2 to 3?) was to drop Win32 support. Which I at the time didn't like. We go full circle.

Not sure what you’re referring to.

Gtk 1.2 did not really have great Win32 support, was basically a one man show primarily to get gimp to run on Windows. The Win32 backend took off after gtk2, there was more commercial push from Ximian to make it a cross platform toolkit via Gtk# as well. And it wasn’t dropped in 3 or 4, though it definitely has lost development steam as commercial interest in it and cross platform desktop GUI toolkits in general has flagged and consolidated.

I think I had it one major release off. It was probably the gtk3 era. I read comments on the mailing list that you basically shouldn't rely on Win32 support.

You're right that gdk2 ramped up Win32 support, I remember that now.

Desktop environments are inherently very personal things and so what one person might find great, someone else might consider unusable. Themes are a good way to add room for user preference without forcing the user to change desktop environments entirely.

For example, before libadwaita screwed it all up I used to like to apply a custom theme to GNOME to cut down on the egregious padding everywhere, making the UI a much better fit for non-touch desktop OS use on a small laptop screen. There were several themes that accomplished that very well.

I just like how the cursor looks. I'd never buy a mac but I can admit the icons and design look nice.

Maybe Posy cursor would be a good substitute for you: https://michieldb.nl/other/cursors/

Does it also get bigger when you wiggle it?

there's cursor themes on linux and although you have to apply them in the usual wonky linux way, it's totally possible and it is independent of the window manager.

Of course some applications do their own cursor management so if you do it poorly your cursor hops around themes as you drag it over various windows based on the toolkit they use but then again, that's what we all signed up for.

for years i’ve stuck with Chicago95 and I refuse to use windows 95

I just had to use Windows 11 to do some work for a client, and it made me miss Windows 95. XP even more.

WSL is a welcome addition of course. PS is pretty powerful. The rest is painful. :D

I wouldn't primarily base my OS choice based on the theme. There is so much more about an OS that is more important. But that doesn't mean that I can't like the look of the other OS.

If you want Ubuntu theme but with different accent color, there is Yaru [1].

[1] https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru

Even if a theme is perfect, it eventually stops getting updated with new versions of whatever you're using so you have to give it up eventually.

Have you tried the Pop_OS theme? I think it looks good.

Pop!_OS also has a built-in tiling window feature called "Automatic Window Tiling." It's integrated into the default desktop environment rather than being a separate tiling window manager like dwm. Nice to have something like dwm but without any fiddling.

I've used Mint-X/Y (the default theme for Linux Mint on Cinnamon) for over a decade now, and my experience has always been great.

Mint doesn’t enable snaps by default either, which makes it the superior choice over Ubuntu anyways.

Yeah, the default Ubuntu theme is great.

And if you ever happen to feel adventurous, various Gnome extensions such as Burn My Windows can give you more than enough eye candy while still keeping the stock theme.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/

> it just f*king works.

I think this is the first time I've heard anyone say this about the Linux desktop experience! Kudos to the GNOME/UBUNTU people I guess.

Vertical integration is what is missing for a long time. I was trying to use Linux and FreeBSD previously and it is just a great time sink. Anyways, at least I learned a lot about Linux and it helped me got a job as a systems engineer years later.

Fully agree, if you prefer Ubuntu. Use defaults, switch LTS to LTS.

This theme has many subtle issues as well - the top padding of "vince" in the third window, the width of types etc.

Same goes for Breeze, default theme for KDE Plasma. I've tried a few themes and customisations for UI elements but always came back to the default because of some corner cases.

They used to work better in the 00s/early 10s before API changes to Linux desktop environments. It's why most Linux theming sites seem to be stuck in that era.

Every version of gtk has its own skin engine, and there being gtk 2,3,4,5, you need 4 different skins for all of them.

QT is sightly better, but not much: you have QtStyle, QtQuick styles, and separate Plasma styles.

Still looking back with nostalgia to the themes.org heyday of creativity...

There are a lot creative people, but making a theme work for all programs and people in all situations and edge cases likely requires a gigantic effort that seems best tackled by a corporate team with paid people giving one or two variants persistent attention and a pile of bug reports and fixing. You simply can't maintain a bunch of code or design that you are not using yourself daily, with problems you don't experience and can't reproduce.

Maybe, very maybe, it can be done by somebody with an extreme level of dedication: https://www.nordtheme.com/ports

I wasted an insane amount doing desktop customisation in the late 90's and early 2000's, time I haven't had for a long time. Luckily most default themes are pretty decent these days and sufficiently neutral to work for most situations.