Category: Development

Rethinking Window Management

Window management is one of those areas I’m fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody’s fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we’ve relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are stacked by most recently used, and moved or resized manually.

Overlapping windows can get messy quickly

The traditional windowing system works well as long as you only have a handful of small windows, but issues emerge as soon the number and size of the windows grows. As new windows are opened, existing ones are obscured, sometimes completely hiding them from view. Or, when you open a maximized window, suddenly every other window is hidden.

Over the decades, different OSes have added different tools and workflows to deal with these issues, including workspaces, taskbars, and switchers. However, the basic primitives have not changed since the 70s and, as a result, the issues have never gone away.

While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose.

Most of the time you don’t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that’s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it’s two or three windows next to each other. It’s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it’s up to you to clean it up.

What about tiling?

Traditional tiling window managers solve the hidden window problem by preventing windows from overlapping. While this works well in some cases, it falls short as a general replacement for stacked, floating windows. The first reason for this is that tiling window managers size windows according to the amount of available screen space, yet most apps are designed to be used at a certain size and aspect ratio. For example, chat apps are inherently narrow and end up having large amounts of empty space at large sizes. Similarly, reading a PDF in a tiny window is not fun.

GNOME 44 with the “Forge” tiling extension. Just because windows can be tall and narrow doesn’t mean they should be :)

Another issue with tiling window manager is that they place new windows in seemingly arbitrary positions. This is a consequence of them not having knowledge about the content of a window or the context in which it is being used, and leads to having to manually move or resize windows after the fact, which is exactly the kind of fiddling we want to avoid in the first place.

More constrained tiling window managers such as on iPadOS are interesting in that they’re more purposeful (you always intentionally create the tiling groups). However, this approach only allows tiling two windows side-by-side, and does not scale well to larger screens.

History

This topic has been of interest to the design team for a very long time. I remember discussing it with Jakub at my first GUADEC in 2017, and there have been countless discussions, ideas, and concepts since. Some particular milestones in our thinking were the concept work leading up to GNOME 40 in 2019 and 2020, and the design sessions at the Berlin Mini GUADEC in 2022 and the Brno hackfest in 2023.

Tiling BoF in Brno during the HDR hackfest. Left to right: Robert Mader, Marco Trevisan, Georges Stavracase, Jakub Steiner and Allan Day (remote), Florian Müllner, Jonas Dreßler

I personally have a bit of a tradition working on this problem for at least a few weeks per year. For example, during the first lockdown in 2020 I spent quite a bit of time trying to envision a tiling-first version of GNOME Shell.

2020 mockup for a tiling-first GNOME Shell. More mockups in the OS mockups repo on Gitlab.

Problems with our current tiling

GNOME has had basic tiling functionality since early in the GNOME 3 series. While this is nice to have, it has obvious limitations:

  • It’s completely manual
  • Only 2 windows are supported, and the current implementation is not extensible to more complex layouts
  • Tiled windows are not grouped in the window stack, so both windows are not raised simultaneously and other windows get in the way
  • Workspaces are manual, and not integrated into the workflow
Because tiled windows are currently mixed with overlapping floating windows they’re not really helping make things less messy in practice.

We’ve wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting!

Get out of my way

The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don’t want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn’t solve the problems the majority of people face.

To do this we landed on a number of high level ideas:

  • Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed
  • Make use of workspaces as a fully integrated part of the workflow
  • Richer metadata from apps to allow for better integration

Our current concept imagines windows having three potential layout states:

  • Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating
  • Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
  • Floating, the classic stacked windows model

Mosaic is the default behavior. You open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app. For a web browser that might be maximized, for a weather app maybe only 700×500 pixels.

As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn’t fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled.

You can also manually tile windows. If there’s enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there’s not enough space for this mosaic layout, you’re prompted to pick another window to tile alongside.

You’re not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow.

There are always going to be cases that require placing a window in a specific position on the screen. The new system allows windows to be used with the classic floating behavior, on a layer above the mosaic/tiling windows. However, we think that this floating behaviour is going to be a relatively uncommon, similar to the existing “always on top” behavior that we have today.

There’s of course much more to this, but hopefully this gives an idea of what we have in mind in terms of behavior.

New window metadata

As mentioned above, to avoid the pitfalls of traditional tiling window managers we need more information from windows about their content. Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more.

Some apps should probably never be maximized/tiled on a 4K monitor…

One important missing piece is having information on the maximum desired size of a window. This is the size beyond which the window content stops looking good. Not having this information is one of the reasons that traditional tiling window managers have issues, especially on larger screens. This maximum size would not be a hard limit and manual resizing would still be possible. Instead, the system would use the maximum size as one factor when it calculates an optimal window layout. For example, when tiling to the side of the screen, a window would only grow as wide as its maximum width rather than filling exactly half of the screen.

In addition, it’d be helpful to know the range of ideal sizes where an app works best. While an app may technically work at mobile sizes that’s probably not the best way to use that app if you have a large display. To stay with our chat example, you probably want to avoid folding the sidebar if it can be avoided, so the range of ideal sizes would be between the point where it becomes single pane and its maximum usable size.

Ideally these properties could be set dynamically depending on the window content. For example, a spreadsheet with a lot of columns but few rows could have a wider ideal size than one with lots of rows.

Depending on apps using new system APIs can be challenging and slow — it’s not easy to move the entire ecosystem! However, we think there’s a good chance of success in this case, due to the simplicity and universal usefulness of the API.

Next steps

At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there’s still a lot of work ahead.

On the design side, the biggest uncertainty is the mosaic behavior — it’s a novel approach to window management without much prior art. That’s exciting, but also makes it a bit risky to jump head-first into implementation. We’d like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it’s the kind of project that’s very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that’s usable day to day.

If you’d like to get involved with this initiative, one great way to help out would be to work on an extension that implements (parts of) the mosaic behavior for testing and refining the interactions. If you’re interested in this, please reach out :)

There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage, but it’s definitely 46+ material and likely to take multiple cycles. There are individual parts of this that could be worked on independently ahead of the more contingent pieces, for example tiling groups or new window metadata. Help in any of these areas would be appreciated.

This post is summarizing collaborative work over the past years by the entire design team (Allan Day, Jakub Steiner, Sam Hewitt, et al). In particular, thanks to Jakub for the awesome animations bringing the behaviors to life!

Software 41: Context Tiles

GNOME 41 is going to be released in a few weeks, and as you may have heard it will come with a major refresh to Software’s interface.

Our goals for this initiative included making it a more appealing place to discover and install new apps, exposing app information more clearly, and making it more reliable overall. We’ve made big strides in all these areas, and I think you’ll be impressed how much nicer the app feels in 41.

There’s a lot of UI polish all across the app, including a cleaner layout for app cards, more consistent list views, a new simplified set of categories, a better layout for category pages, and much more.

Most of the groundwork for adaptiveness is also in place now. There are still a few views in need of additional tweaks, but for the most part the app is adaptive in 41.

However, the most visible change in this release is probably the near-complete overhaul of the app details pages. This includes a prettier header section, a more prominent screenshot carousel, and an all-new way of displaying app metadata.

Introducing Context Tiles

For the app details page we wanted to tackle a number of long-standing tricky questions about how to best communicate information about apps. These include:

  • Communicating app download size in a more nuanced way, especially for Flatpak apps where downloading additional shared runtimes may be required as part of installing an app
  • Showing the benefits of software freedom in a tangible way rather than just displaying the license
  • Making it clearer which files, devices, and capabilities apps have access to on the system
  • Incentivizing app developers to use portals rather than poking holes in the sandbox
  • Warning people about potential security problems
  • Providing information on whether the app will work on the current hardware (especially relevant for mobile)
  • Exposing age ratings more prominently and with more context

The solution we came up with is what we call context tiles. The idea is that each of these tiles provides the most important information about a given area at a glance, and clicking it opens a dialog with the full details.

Context tiles on the app details page

Storage

The storage tile has two different states: When the app is not installed, it shows the download size of the app, as well as any additional required downloads (e.g. runtimes). When the app is installed it changes to show the size the app is taking up on disk.

Safety

The Safety tile combines information from a number of sources to give people an overall idea of how safe an app is to install and use.

At the most basic level this is about how technically secure an app is. Two important questions here are whether an app is sandboxed (i.e. whether it’s flatpaked or running on the host), and whether it uses Wayland.

However, even if an app is sandboxed it can still have unlimited access to e.g. your home folder or the webcam, if these are defined as static permissions in the Flatpak manifest.

While for some apps there is no alternative to this (e.g. IDEs are probably always going to need access to the file system), in many cases there are more secure portal APIs through which people can allow limited one-time access to various resources.

For example, if you switch an app from using the old GtkFileChooser to the portal-based GtkFileChooserNative you can avoid requiring a sandbox hole for the file system.

All of the above is of course a lot worse if the app also has internet access, since that can make security issues remotely exploitable and allows malicious apps to potentially exfiltrate user data.

While very important, sandboxing is not the entire story here though. Public auditability of the code is also very important for ensuring the security of an app, especially for apps which have a lot of permissions. This is also taken into consideration to assess the overall safety of an app, as a practical advantage of software freedom.

Folding all of these factors into a single rating at scale isn’t easy. I expect we’ll continue to iterate on this over the next few cycles, but I think what we have in 41 is a great step in the right direction.

Hardware Support

With GNOME Mobile progressing nicely and large parts of our app ecosystem going adaptive it’s becoming more important to be able to check whether an app is adaptive before installing it. However, while adaptiveness is the most prominent use case for the hardware support tile at the moment, it’s not the only one.

The hardware support tile is a generic way to display which input and output devices an app supports or requires, and whether they match the currently available hardware. For example, this can also be used to communicate whether an app is fully keyboard-accessible or requires a gamepad.

Age Rating

Age ratings (via OARS) have been in Software for years, but we’ve wanted to present this information in a better way for some time.

The context tile we’re introducing in 41 shows the reasons for the rating at a glance, rather than just a rating.

The dialog shows more information on the exact types of content the app includes, though the current implementation is not quite the design we’d like here eventually. Due to technical constraints we currently list every single type of content and whether or not the app contains it, but ideally it would only show broad categories for things the app doesn’t contain. This will hopefully be improved next cycle to make the list easier to scan.

Metadata Matters

No matter how good an app store itself is, its appeal for people ultimately comes from the apps within it. Luckily GNOME has a sizable ecosystem of cool third party apps these days, exactly the kinds of apps people are looking to discover when they open Software.

However, not all of these apps look as good as they could in Software currently due to incomplete, outdated, or low quality metadata.

If the version of Adwaita on your screenshots is so old that people get nostalgic it’s probably time to take new ones ;)

Additionally, Software 41 comes with some changes to how app metadata is presented (e.g. context tiles, larger screenshots), which make it more prominently visible than before.

This means now is the perfect moment to review and update your app metadata and make a new release ahead of the GNOME 41 release in a few weeks.

Lucky for you I already wrote a blog post walking you through the different kinds of metadata your app needs to really shine in Software 41. Please check it out and update your apps!

Conclusion

Software 41 was a real team effort, and I’d like to thank everyone who helped make it happen, especially Philip Withnall, Phaedrus Leeds, Adrien Plazas, and Milan Crha for doing most of the implementation work, but also Allan Day and Jakub Steiner for helping with various aspects of the design.

This is also a cool success story for cross-company upstream collaboration with people from Endless, Purism, and Red Hat all working together on an upstream-first product initiative. High fives all around!

Get your apps ready for Software 41

Software 41 will be released with the rest of GNOME 41 in a few weeks, and it brings a number of changes to how app metadata is presented, including the newly added hardware support information, larger screenshots, more visible age ratings, and more.

If you haven’t updated your app’s metadata in a while this is the perfect moment to review what you have, update what’s missing, and release a new version ahead of the GNOME 41 release!

In this blog post I’ll walk you through the different kinds of metadata your app needs to really shine in Software 41, and best practices for adding it.

App Summary

The app summary is a very short description that gives people an idea of what the app does. It’s often used in combination with the app name, e.g. on banners and app tiles.

If your summary is ellipsized on the app tile, you know what to do :)

In Software 41 we’re using the summary much more prominently than before, so it’s quite important for making your app look good. In particular, make sure to keep it short (we recommend below 35 characters, but the shorter the better), or it will look weird or be ellipsized.

Writing a good summary

The summary should answer the question “What superpower does this app give me?”. It doesn’t need to comprehensively describe everything the app does, as long as it highlights one important aspect and makes it clear why it’s valuable.

Some general guidance:

  • Keep it short (less than 35 characters)
  • Be engaging and make people curious
  • Use imperative if possible (e.g. “Browse the web” instead of “A web browser”)
  • Use sentence case

Things to avoid:

  • Technical details (e.g. the toolkit or programming language)
  • Structures like “GUI for X” or “Client for Y”
  • Mentioning the target environment (e.g. “X for GNOME”)
  • Repeating the app’s name
  • Overly generic adjectives like “simple”, “easy”, “powerful”, etc.
  • Articles (e.g. “A …” or “An …”)
  • Punctuation (e.g. a period at the end)
  • Title case (e.g. “Chat With Your Team”)

Good examples:

  • Maps: “Find places around the world”
  • Shortwave: “Listen to internet radio”
  • Byte: “Rediscover your music”

Code Example

The app summary is set in your appdata XML file, and looks like this:

<summary>Listen to internet radio</summary>

Appstream documentation

Device Support

Hardware support metadata describes what kinds of input and output devices an app supports, or requires to be useful. This is a relatively recent addition to appstream, and will be displayed in Software 41 for the first time.

The primary use case for this at the moment is devices with small displays needing to query whether an app will fit on the screen, but there are all sorts of other uses for this, e.g. to indicate that an app is not fully keyboard-accessible or that a game needs a gamepad.

Code Examples

Appstream has a way for apps to declare what hardware they absolutely need (<require>), and things that are known to work (<recommends>). You can use these two tags in your appdata XML to specify what hardware is supported.

For screen size, test the minimum size your app can scale to and put that in as a requirement. The “ge” stands for “greater or equal”, so this is what you’d do if your app can scale to phone sizes (360px or larger):

<requires>
  <display_length compare="ge">360</display_length>
</requires>

Note: The appstream spec also specifies some named sizes (xsmall, small, large, etc.), which are broken and should not be used. It’s likely that they’ll be removed in the future, but for now just don’t use them.

Input devices can be specified like so:

<recommends>
  <control>keyboard</control>
  <control>pointing</control>
  <control>touch</control>
</recommends>

Appstream documentation

Screenshots

If you want your app to make a good impression good screenshots are a must-have. This is especially true in 41, because screenshots are much larger and more prominent now.

The new, larger screenshot carousel

Some general guidance for taking good app screenshots:

  • Provide multiple screenshots showing off the main areas of the app
  • Use window screenshots with a baked-in shadow (you can easily take them with Alt+PrintScr).
  • For apps that show content (e.g. media apps, chat apps, creative tools, file viewers, etc.) the quality of the example content makes the screenshot. Setting up a great screenshot with content takes a ton of time, but it’s absolutely worth it.
  • If you’re only doing screenshots in a single language/locale, use en-US.
  • Don’t force a large size if your app is generally used at small sizes. If the app is e.g. a small utility app a tiny window size is fine.

Before taking your screenshots make sure your system is using GNOME default settings. If your distribution changes these, an easy way to make sure they are all correct is to take them in a VM with Fedora, Arch, or something else that keeps to defaults. In particular, make sure you have the following settings:

  • System font: Cantarell
  • GTK stylesheet: Adwaita
  • System icons: Adwaita Icon Theme
  • Window controls: Close button only, on the right side

Things to avoid:

  • Fullscreen screenshots with no borders or shadow.
  • Awkward aspect ratios. Use what feels natural for the app, ignore the 16:9 recommendation in the appstream spec.
  • Huge window sizes. They make it very hard to see things in the carousel. Something like 800×600 is a good starting point for most apps.

Code Example

Screenshots are defined in the appdata XML file and consist of an image and a caption which describes the image.

  <screenshots>
    <screenshot type="default">
      <image>https://domain.tld/screenshot.png</image>
      <caption>Screenshot caption</caption>
    </screenshot>
  </screenshots>

Appstream documentation

Other Metadata

The things I’ve covered in detail here are the most prominent pieces of metadata, but there are also a number of others which are less visible and less work to add, but nevertheless important.

These include links to various websites for the project, all of which are also defined in the appstream XML.

  • App website (or code repository if it has no dedicated website)
  • Issue tracker
  • Donations
  • Translations
  • Online help or user documentation

When making releases it’s also important to add release notes for the new version to your appdata file, otherwise the version history box on your details page looks pretty sad:

Conclusion

I hope this has been useful, and inspired you to update your metadata today!

Most of these things can be updated in a few minutes, and it’s really worth it. It doesn’t just make your app look good, but the ecosystem as a whole.

Thanks in advance :)

Restyling apps at scale

tl;dr: If you want to change how an app looks, you need a designer in the loop.

Over the past few months we’ve had a lively debate about “theming” in GNOME, and how it affects our ecosystem. In this discussion I’ve found that there is a divide between people who design and/or develop apps, and people who don’t. I have yet to see an app developer who thinks the current approach to “theming” can work, while many people who aren’t app developers are arguing that it can.

After a few long discussions I started to realize that part of the reason why there’s so little agreement and so much drama around this issue is that we don’t agree what the problem is. Those who don’t work on apps often can’t see the issues with theming and think we want to remove things for no reason, while those who do are very frustrated that the other side doesn’t want to acknowledge how broken everything is.

The basic issue we’re arguing about is whether it’s possible to restyle applications automatically, at scale, without breaking them. In this post I’ll try to explain why I think that it isn’t possible, and why trying to do it is hurting our ecosystem.

There are no themes, just CSS

A fundamental misconception a lot of people have is that GTK 3 supports theming. This is not true, as there is no clearly defined theming API. There are CSS stylesheets, but they were only ever meant to be used by the platform and app developers. The platform stylesheet is called Adwaita (“the only one” in Sanskrit) for a reason.

However, some people (inlcluding major distributions) have been using custom stylesheets as a hacky approximation of “themes” for so long now that nobody even remembers that they are not a real theming API.

An older version of GRadio with Ubuntu’s Ambiance theme

Since CSS is a huge API surface, which is used by both app developers and “theme” developers, it’s very easy for the two to conflict. This leads to apps looking broken unless you manually do QA for every app/theme combination.

“You’re exaggerating, it’s not that bad.”

One of the most frustrating things about the current situation is that to users, it looks like it almost works. For the most part, third-party themes look and work okayish, there are just a few small bugs here and there. A button with too little contrast, an underline clashing with a border, a really large loading spinner. Not that big a deal, you’d think.

However, this view of the situation misses a few really important realities:

  1. App developers are doing a lot of bug fixing to account for “theming”, because people complain to them when their app is broken on certain distros. The current situation essentially forces developers to fix bugs for setups they never intended to support in the first place. They’re not happy about it, but they’re doing it because they don’t want their users to have broken apps.
  2. App developers are trying hard to not do anything innovative or visual in their apps, because they know it will break with other stylesheets.
  3. “Theme” developers are fixing a lot of bugs for edge cases in individual apps in their stylesheets. Of course, this is a never-ending task because as soon as a new version of an app is released, something will very likely be broken again.

All of this only kinda sorta works because we have very few apps. If we ever hope to grow our ecosystem past a few dozen apps things have to change, because maintaining a “theme” gets less sustainable with every new app.

There is also the question of what your definition of “broken” is. Some people think that things like these are acceptable:

Date picker in Calendar on Pop OS: There are double arrows left of the month and year labels.
“New Folder” dialog in Nautilus with Ambiance: There’s an invisible “Create” button in the top right.
Gedit on Pop OS: There’s a brown rectangle sticking out of the window at the top, and the widgets at the top of the sidebar look awkward and don’t make sense in this configuration.

I believe this is nowhere near ok. App developers put a lot of effort into making sure their apps look and feel right, fixing bugs, and doing QA. Having distributors change their apps (often in ways that break things) with no QA before users get to experience them is developer-hostile, and would be unacceptable in any other context.

Can you imagine Samsung restyling every third-party app on their phones, without testing them, and when Instagram complains that the text on their buttons is illegible Samsung just shrug and say “Sorry, but branding is very important to us. Why don’t you change your app?”.

“But it’s fine as long as you follow best practices!”

This is a common sentiment among some people. “If only app developers followed best practices, used CSS variables, and derived their colors from theme colors, everything would be fine”, the argument goes. While it’s true that these things are important and make apps more flexible in terms of appearance, this doesn’t come close to solving the entire problem.

If every app only used default GTK controls, in very simple layouts, with no custom widgets or in-app CSS, then best practices would perhaps be enough to prevent apps from breaking. But the reality is that a) this is not the case, and b) we really don’t want it to be the case.

Human Interface Guidelines are just that: guidelines. They have to be implemented manually, they change and evolve over time, and the best apps on any platform push their boundaries in some places and experiment with new patterns (which then sometimes make their way back into the HIG).

This kind of experimentation means that it’s impossible to “theme” apps automatically. Visual design and interaction design are very closely linked, so if you want to change the style, you need a designer to actually think about what a widget should look like.

For example: How should the Pop theme know what a “flat” variant of the new Nautilus path bar should look like? It’s impossible to do this automatically, because it’s a new pattern.

The new path bar in Nautilus
The new path bar in Nautilus with the Pop OS theme (completely broken)

This is not a rare situation, even among core GNOME apps. Many of the apps I’ve personally worked on have their own equivalent of the Nautilus path bar. And that’s the way it should be. Apps have different needs that sometimes require custom solutions, and this experimentation is good for the ecosystem. However, it also means that automatic restyling is impossible.

“But what about Adwaita Dark and High Contrast?”

The point that the dark and high contrast variants of Adwaita can be seen as GTK 3 kinda sorta supporting themes is technically accurate, but misguided. Adwaita variants may technically just be different stylesheets, but this is just an implementation detail. There are very clear differences between them and third-party “themes”.

  1. They are very very close to Adwaita code-wise, and therefore much less likely to break.
  2. There’s a finite number of them, and they are part of the platform. This makes them a tangible target for developers to test for and support, which is completely different from third-party “themes” which just apply random CSS to every app without any QA.
  3. They are part of the same design language, so they require very little extra work to adapt to from a design point of view. If you follow the best practices mentioned above, often no work at all.
GNOME Builder with Adwaita Dark

“But what about consistency? I want all my apps to look the same!”

“Consistency” is a word you hear a lot in debates about theming, but it seems to mean different things to different people.

To some, consistency effectively means “everything should use the same colors”. This is relatively easy to achieve for some apps, even across toolkits, if you simply provide a “theme” for each toolkit.
However, this “consistency” is very shallow. Just because a Qt app uses the Adwaita colors it doesn’t automatically fit in with the GNOME platform. UI patterns are much more important, and they can’t be changed with theming. There is no magic that can redesign menu bar apps with header bars.

No matter how hard you theme these, they will never look native on GNOME

Real consistency can only happen by design, and requires the app developer to build it into the app at every step. If you want all your apps to look the same, only use apps built for your platform’s HIG. “Fixing” apps after the fact with theming isn’t really making your system more consistent, but it’s hurting app developers a great deal.

Of course, even the very shallow “everything uses the same colors” consistency is impossible to enforce across all apps and toolkits. Apps like Blender, Telegram, or Steam don’t respond to system theming at all, and even Firefox and Chromium only do so in a very limited fashion.

“But users *want* themes!”

“Users” want a lot of things, but just because you want something impossible that doesn’t make it possible. In this case, it’s important to be aware of the costs of giving complete visual freedom to “themes”, both in individual app developer effort, and chilling effects on the ecosystem. If given a choice between customization and more, better apps, I’m confident the majority of people would prefer the latter.

Would it be nice if there were a way to be able to restyle every app to make them look like Material Design, or macOS, or Windows 95, and have them all look as if they were built for that style? Absolutely! I would love that! However, as I’ve tried to explain in this blog post, this is simply not realistic.

So, what can we do?

As the recent discussions have shown, talking about solutions before we agree what the problem is isn’t very productive, so for now I’m mostly interested in making sure we’re all aware of the problem and its various facets. There are several different stakeholders with different perspectives on this issue, and making progress will mean making some hard choices. At this year’s GUADEC we had a Theming & Ecosystem BoF where we talked about a number of potential directions, and I hope we can move forward on that path.

No matter what we come up with though, I think it’s crucial that we start taking the needs of app developers seriously. Developers are the lifeblood of any platform, and we’ve been treating them very poorly. If we want to grow our ecosystem and actually compete with other major platforms, we need to fix that.

Note: The examples in this post have been chosen because the themes in question ship with major distributions, so app developers tend to get complaints about them. It’s not my intention to single them out, this problem applies to all third-party themes equally.