Themes – Space and Meaning

There is No “Linux” Platform (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of a series on what’s wrong with the free desktop app ecosystem and how we can fix it, based on the talk Jordan Petridis and I gave at LAS 2019 in Barcelona.

In Part 1 we looked at all the different elements making up a platform, and found that there is only one “complete” platform in the free software desktop world at the moment. This is because desktops control the developer platforms, while packaging and system integration is managed by separate communities, the distributions, for historical reasons. This additional layer of middlemen is a key reason why we don’t have real platforms.

Power to the Makers

The problems outlined in Part 1 are of course not new, and people have been working on solutions to them for a long time. Some of these solutions have really started to come together over the last few years, empowering the people making the software to distribute it directly to the people using it.

Thanks to the work of many amazing people in our community you can now develop an app in GNOME Builder, submit it to Flathub, get it reviewed, and have it available for people to install right away. Once it’s on there you can also update it on a schedule you control. No more waiting 6 months for the next distribution release!

Thanks to GNOME Builder’s Flatpak integration, “works on my machine” is largely a thing of the past now!

But though this is all very awesome, Flatpak is unfortunately not a complete solution to the platform conundrum discussed earlier in this series.

Flatpak is Not Enough

Flatpak does solve a number of the issues around app distribution very elegantly, because app developers do their own packaging, and control their release schedule. It’s also a unified package format that works across different host systems, and the Flatpak runtimes are clearly defined development targets to do QA against.

But that doesn’t magically fix all our problems. The two elephants in the room are

The Host still matters: Flatpak only solves part of the issues with distro packaged apps
Downstream drama: Flatpak does not address the conflicts between desktops and distributions

1. The Host Still Matters

Even with Flatpak there are still some unpredictable variables on the host system which affect app developers. On the technical side a number of things can go wrong, from an outdated Flatpak version (which can mean some Portals apps rely on may be missing), to missing/incompatible system APIs such as password storage, calendar, or address book.

These things can lead to applications not working properly, or at all. For example, this is why new versions of GNOME Contacts cannot access any contacts on Debian 10, why recent GNOME Calendar cannot access any calendars on Ubuntu 18.04, or why Fractal doesn’t remember your password across restarts on some non-GNOME environments.

There are also user-facing integration points where applications interface with the system. These include things like notifications, the application menu, search providers, the old systray, and the design patterns used in individual apps.

For example, when the system UI or design guidelines change, applications follow the platform and change their UI accordingly. This means if you install newer apps on an older system, there are going to be weird edge cases. For example, if you install new apps on Debian 10 you get a confusing mix of the old and new application menu paradigms because the design guidelines were changed with GNOME 3.32 (early 2019).

Before GNOME 3.32 applications had global menu items in the application menu in the Shell top bar, but now they are in the primary menu, inside the app window.

Flatpak also applies the host GTK stylesheet and icon set to apps. This means that if the host distribution overrides the system stylesheet, Flatpak will happily apply random, never-tested CSS to every app. Obviously this leads to lots of issues, ranging from ugly but relatively harmless glitches to real usability issues, such as illegible text on buttons. For more background on this particular issue, see this blog post.

Some of these issues could be fixed with more standardization, changes to Flatpak, or new portals. However, fundamentally, in order to be a real platform you need a clearly defined environment to develop and test for. Flatpak alone is not enough to achieve that.

Just like “write once, run everywhere” is always an illusion, it’s never going to be possible to completely split apps from the OS. You always need app developers to do some extra work to support different environments, and currently every distribution represents yet another extra environment to support.

2. Downstream Drama

Flatpak does not completely solve the issues app developers face in shipping their software, because these can not be isolated from the ones desktop developers face. In order to fix the app developer story we need real platforms. In order to get those we need to resolve the desktop/distribution dilemma.

The issues here roughly match the ones with traditional distribution packaging mentioned in Part 1, and can be grouped into three broad categories:

Structural issues inherent to having distributions and desktops be separate projects.
Fragmentation issues because we have multiple of everything so there’s duplication and/or bad abstraction layers.
Configuration issues, primarily around settings and other defaults, which have to be set at the distribution level but affect the user experience.

Structural Issues

One of the biggest structural issues is distribution release schedules not being aligned with the upstream one (or between different distributions). GNOME releases every 6 months, but distributions can take anywhere from a few weeks to several years to ship these releases.

This category also includes distributions overriding upstream decisions around system UX, as well as theming/branding issues, due to problematic downstream incentives. This means there is no clear platform visual identity developers can target.

For example, Ubuntu 18.04 (the current LTS) ships with GNOME 3.28 (from March 2018), includes significant changes to system UX and APIs (e.g. Unity-style dock, desktop icons, systray extension), and ships a branded stylesheet that breaks even in core applications.

Ubuntu 18.04 overrides the GTK system stylesheet, which results in the “Create” button on the new folder dialog in Files being invisible (among many many other issues, especially in third party apps).

Fragmentation Issues

Having multiple implementations of everything means we either need do tons of duplicate work, or try to abstract over the different implementations.

On one end of the spectrum there are OS installers: There is no GNOME installer, so every distribution builds their own. Unfortunately, most of these installers are not very good, and don’t integrate well with the rest of the desktop experience (e.g. they use different design patterns than the OS itself). This can be either due to a lack of resources (e.g. not every downstream has their own GNOME designers), or because different distributions have specific downstream goals and motivations (e.g. Fedora and RHEL share an installer, which introduces lots of complexity).

The famously awkward Fedora installer is a good example of why such core parts of the experience should be designed and developed upstream. Unfortunately this isn’t really feasible due to distribution fragmentation.

In other areas we have the opposite problem, because we’re trying to abstract over the fragmentation with a single component. For example, PackageKit is meant to abstract over different package formats, but in practice it only works for a handful of them, and even for those it’s often buggy. The PackageKit maintainers have officially given up on this approach.

Configuration Issues

This includes the default apps, the fonts shipped with the system by default, the terminal shell and prompt, and the UX around things like Plymouth. All of these things are usually configured at the distribution level and are therefore often not great, because these choices need to be made in concert with the rest of the platform UX.

Forging Platforms

Given the constraint of there being multiple different desktops projects and technology stacks (and the host still mattering), we’ll never have a single “Linux” or “FreeDesktop” platform. We could have one platform per desktop though.

From an app developer point of view, testing for GNOME, KDE, and elementary isn’t as nice as testing only for a single platform, but it’s not impossible. However, testing for Debian, Fedora, multiple Ubuntu releases, OpenSUSE, Arch, Endless, and dozens more is not and never will be feasible, even with Flatpak. Multiple different distributions, even ones that ship the same desktop environment, don’t add up to a platform. But exactly that is what we need, one way or another.

The question is, how do we get there?

The Nuclear Option

When we look at it from a Flatpak context, the solution seems obvious. Flatpak is solving the middleman problem for app developers by circumventing the distributions and providing a direct channel between developers and end users. What if we could do the same thing for the OS itself?

Of course the situation isn’t exactly the same, so what would that mean in practice?

With Flatpak runtimes there is no extra “distribution” abstraction layer. There are no Debian or Fedora runtimes, just GNOME and KDE, because those are the technology stacks app developers target.

These runtimes are already more or less full-fledged distributions which are controlled by the desktops, we’re just not using them as such. The Freedesktop SDK (which most runtimes are based on) is not based in any distro, but built directly from upstream sources using Buildstream as the build tool, and it already has most of the things you need to make a basic operating system.

There is an early-stage effort to make bootable nightly GNOME OS images for development/testing, built on top of the Freedesktop SDK. From there it wouldn’t be a huge leap to actually make an independent, consumer-facing platform OS for GNOME (and KDE, and other platforms).

However, though this is likely to become a very attractive solution in the future, there are a number of hurdles to be overcome:

An OS needs an installer, OS updates, a Plymouth theme, etc. All of these are being worked on for the nightly GNOME OS images, but are not quite there yet.
A “real” OS needs a dedicated group of people doing things like release management, security tracking, and QA. These are being done to some degree for the Flatpak runtimes, but a consumer OS would need more manpower.
It’s an OSTree-based immutable system, which means there is no traditional package management. Apps are installed via Flatpak, and server/developer workflows need to happen in containers. Though projects like Silverblue’s toolbox have come a long way over the past few years, there’s still work to be done before immutable OSes can painlessly replace systems with old-school package managers for all use cases.

It takes time to start a new operating system from scratch, especially when it’s using cutting-edge technology. So while things like GNOME OS could be amazing in the longer-term future, it’s likely going to take a few more years before this becomes a viable alternative.

Squaring the Circle

What could we do within the constraints of the technology, ecosystem, and communities we have today, then? If we can’t go around distributions with a platform OS, the only alternative is to meld the distributions into a meta platform OS.

Technically there’s nothing stopping a group of separate distributions from acting more or less like a unified platform OS together. It would require extraordinary discipline and compromise on all sides (admittedly not things our communities are usually known for), but given how important it is that we fix this problem, it’s at least worth thinking about.

To get an idea what this could look like in practice, let’s think through some of the specific issues mentioned earlier:

Release Schedule: This is probably among the thorniest issues since release cycles vary wildly in length and structure, and changing them is very difficult. It’s not unimaginable that at least some progress could be made here though. For example, GNOME could have long term support releases every 2-3 years for “stable” distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu LTS. Distributions could then agree to either be on the regular 6 month schedule, or the 2 year “LTS” schedule. Alternatively, all distributions could find a single compromise schedule that can work for everyone (e.g. maybe one release per year, like mobile operating systems do).

Theming/Branding: Some distributions want ways to customize the OS experience such that their system looks recognizably different from others. This is not necessarily a problem, as long as this is done using APIs that are supported and intended to be used in this way (which unfortunately is currently not happening in many cases).

Creating more branding opportunities which do not break APIs which apps rely upon (especially third party apps shipped via Flatpak), is certainly possible and there have been discussions in this direction (e.g. GTK accent colors). Whether distributions would limit themselves to these APIs once they exist is of course an open question, but at least there is a ongoing dialog about this.

System UX/API Changes: Some distributions make significant changes to the core system, which fragments the visual identity of the platform at best, and severely damages the app ecosystem at worst. This includes things like adding a permanent dock, icons on the desktop, re-enabling the systray, or a “dark mode” setting which just changes the system stylesheet from under apps.

The solution here is simple in theory: If you think a change to the system UX is needed to fix a specific problem, don’t just patch it downstream, but instead help to address the actual underlying issue (We already touched on this in Part 1). For example, if you find that new users are confused by the empty desktop at startup, don’t just ship an extension that completely breaks the structure of the shell. Bring the problem to the upstream designers and developers, figure out a solution together, and help implement it upstream.

In practice it’s not always that easy, but a lot can be done by simply adopting an upstream-first UX mindset. It can take a while to get used to, especially for companies with more, uh, “traditional” internal processes, but it’s definitely possible seeing as it’s working well for Red Hat and Purism, for example.

OS Installer: It may not be doable to have a single code base, but we could definitely share at least the design (and possibly some UI code) for the installers used across distributions. A cross-distribution initiative for nice, native GNOME installers across the major distributions would probably not be easy logistically, but is not unimaginable.

Software Installation & Updates: GNOME Software and PackageKit’s “abstract across distros” strategy has clearly failed, and we need a new approach here. For applications there is a relatively easy solution: Distributions stop packaging apps, and work together on a common repository of developer-submitted Flatpaks (e.g. something like Flathub). We’d need to work out how this common solution can accommodate various distribution policies around e.g. proprietary software, but this seems very doable and most of it already exists in Flathub.

The resources currently going into repackaging every app for every distribution could be pooled to review the apps submitted by developers to the common Flatpak repository.

Seeing as most distributions are not (yet) image-based like e.g. Silverblue or Endless, we would still also need a way to update the packages that make up the core system. For this there’s probably no way around backend duplication.

System Default Configuration: Making progress in this area is likely not too difficult comparatively. The main thing we’d need is better coordination between the various parties needed to synchronize these things better (which is of course easier said than done). Having some kind of common forum where the upstream design and release team, as well as people in charge of major distributions can discuss and standardize defaults across the entire ecosystem might work for that.

The Bottom Line

If we want a future with real platforms we can either go around the distributions or have them all work together (or potentially both), but one way or another we need to vertically integrate.

Neither path is straightforward or easy, and there’s a huge amount of work ahead either way. However, the first and most important step is acknowledging that this problem exists, and that we need to radically change our approach if we’re serious about building attractive app ecosystems.

The good news is that many people across different projects are already working towards enabling this future. We hope that you’ll join us.

Happy hacking :)

Doing Things That Scale

There was a point in my life when I ran Arch, had an elaborate personalized terminal prompt, and my own custom icon theme. I stopped doing all these things at various points for different reasons, but underlying them all is a general feeling that it’s taken me some time to figure out how to articulate: I no longer want to invest time in things that don’t scale.

What I mean by that in particular is things that

Only fix a problem for myself (and maybe a small group of others)
Have to be maintained in perpetuity (by me)

Not only is it highly wasteful for me to come up with a custom solution to every problem, but in most cases those solutions would be worse than ones developed in collaboration with others. It also means nobody will help maintain these solutions in the long run, so I’ll be stuck with extra work, forever.

Conversely, things that scale

Fix the problem in way that will just work™ for most people, most of the time
Are developed, used, and maintained by a wider community

A few examples:

I used to have an Arch GNU/Linux setup with tons of tweaks and customizations. These days I just run vanilla Fedora. It’s not perfect, but for actually getting things done it’s way better than what I had before. I’m also much happier knowing that if something goes seriously wrong I can reinstall and get to a usable system in half an hour, as opposed to several hours of tedious work for setting up Arch. Plus, this is a setup I can install for friends and relatives, because it does a decent job at getting people to update when I’m not around.

Until relatively recently I always set a custom monospace font in my editor and terminal when setting up a new machine. At some point I realized that I wouldn’t have to do that if the default was nicer, so I just opened an issue. A discussion ensued, a better default was agreed upon, and voilà — my problem was solved. One less thing to do after every install. And of course, everyone else now gets a nicer default font too!

I also used to use ZSH with a configuration framework and various plugins to get autocompletion, git status, a fancy prompt etc. A few years ago I switched to fish. It gives me most of what I used to get from my custom ZSH thing, but it does so out of the box, no configuration needed. Of course ideally we’d have all of these things in the default shell so everyone gets these features for free, but that’s hard to do unfortunately (if you’re interested in making it happen I’d love to talk!).

Years ago I used to maintain my own extension set to the Faenza icon theme, because Faenza didn’t cover every app I was using. Eventually I realized that trying to draw a consistent icon for every single third party app was impossible. The more icons I added, the more those few apps that didn’t have custom icons stuck out. Nowadays when I see an app with a poor icon I file an issue asking if the developer would like help with a nicer one. This has worked out great in most cases, and now I probably have more consistent app icons on my system than back when I used a custom theme. And of course, everyone gets to enjoy the nicer icons, not only me.

Some other things that don’t scale (in no particular order):

Separate home partition
Dotfiles
Non-trivial downstream patches
Manual tracker/cookie/Javascript blocking (I use uMatrix, which is already a lot nicer than NoScript, but still a pretty terrible experience)
Multiple Firefox profiles
User styles on websites
Running your blog on a static site generator
Manual backups
Encrypted email
Hosting your own email (and self-hosting more generally)
Google-free Android (I use Lineage on a Pixel 1, it’s a miserable existence)
Buying a Windows computer and installing GNU/Linux
Auto-starting apps
Custom keyboard shortcuts, e.g. for launching apps (I still have a few of these, mostly because of muscle memory)

The free software community tends to celebrate custom, hacky solutions to problems as something positive (“It’s so flexible!”), even when these hacks are only necessary because things are broken by default. It’s nice that people with a lot of time and technical skills can fix their own problems, but the benefits from that don’t automatically trickle down to everybody else.

If we want ethical technology to become accessible to more people, we need to invest our (very limited) time and energy in solutions that scale. This means good defaults instead of endless customization, apps instead of scripts, “it just works” instead of “read the fucking manual”. The extra effort to make proper solutions that work for everyone, rather than hacks just for ourselves can seem daunting, but is always worth it in the long run. Just as with accessibility and commenting your code, the person most likely to benefit from it is you, in the future.

There is no “Linux” Platform (Part 1)

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts based on the talk Jordan Petridis and I gave at LAS 2019 in Barcelona. Read part 2 here.

In our community there is this idea that “Linux” is the third platform next to Windows and macOS. It’s closely connected to things like the “year of the Linux desktop”, and can be seen in the language around things like Flatpak, which bills itself as “The Future of Apps on Linux” and the Linux App Summit, which is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem”.

But what does that actually mean? What does a healthy app ecosystem look like? And why don’t we have one?

I think the core of the problem is actually the layer below that: Before we can have healthy ecosystems, we need healthy platforms to build them on.

What is a Platform?

The word “platform” is often used without a clear definition of what exactly that entails. If we look at other successful platforms there are a ton of different things enabling their success, which are easy to miss when you just look at the surface.

On the developer side you need an operating system developers can use to make apps. You also need a developer SDK and tooling which are integrated with the operating system. You need developer documentation, tutorials, etc. so people can learn how to develop for the platform. And of course once the apps are built there needs to be an app store to submit them to.

Developers can’t make great apps all by themselves, for that you also need designers. Designers need tools to mock up and prototype apps, platform UI patterns for things like layout and navigation, so every app doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, and a visual design language so designers can make their app fit in with the rest of the system visually. You also need Human Interface Guidelines documenting all of the above, as well as tutorials and other educational resources to help people learn to design for the platform.

On the end user side you need a consumer OS with an integrated app store, where people can get the great apps developers make. The consumer OS can be the same as the developer OS, but doesn’t have to be (e.g. it isn’t for Android or iOS). You also need a way for people to get help/support when they have problems with their system (whether that’s physical stores, a help website, or just easily google-able Stackoverflow questions).

That’s a lot of different things, but we can group them into four major pieces which are needed in order for something to be a real platform:

Operating System
Developer Platform
Design Language
App Store

So if we look at the free software world, where are the platforms?

Linux?

Linux is a kernel, which can be used to build OSes, which can be used to build platforms. Some people (e.g. Google with Android) have done so, but a kernel by itself doesn’t have any of the four things outlined above, and therefore is not a platform.

FreeDesktop.org?

What about “Desktop Linux”, which is what people usually mean when they say “Linux”? The problem is that this term doesn’t have a clear definition. You could take it to mean “FreeDesktop.org”, but that also doesn’t come close to being a platform. FreeDesktop is a set of standards that can be used to build platforms (and/or ensure some level of compatibility between different platforms). Endorsement of a single platform or set of technologies goes directly against FreeDesktop’s aims, and as such it should only be thought of as the common building blocks platforms might share.

Ubuntu?

What about distributions? Ubuntu is one of the most popular ones, and unlike others it has its own app store. It still isn’t a platform though, because it doesn’t have the most critical pieces: a developer SDK/technology stack, and a design language.

Other distributions are in a similar but worse position because they don’t have an app store.

GNOME?

GNOME is the most popular desktop stack, and it does have an SDK and design language. However, it only sort of has an app store (because GNOME people work on Flathub), and it doesn’t have an OS. Many distributions ship GNOME, but they are all different in various ways (more on this later), so they don’t provide a unified development target.

Elementary?

Interestingly, the only project which currently has all the pieces is elementary. It has an OS, an SDK, a HIG, and an app store to submit apps to. The OS is largely Ubuntu and the technology stack largely GNOME, but it develops its own desktop and apps on top of that, and does the integration work to make it into a complete consumer product.

This begs the question, why is elementary the only one?

The Means of Distribution

The reasons for this are largely historical. In the early days, free software desktops were a bunch of independently developed components. They were not necessarily designed for each other, or well integrated. This meant in order to have a usable system, someone needed to curate these components and assemble them into an operating system: The first distributions were born.

Over the last decades this landscape has changed drastically, however. While GNOME 1 was a set of loosely coupled components, GNOME 2 was already much more cohesive and GNOME 3 is now essentially an integrated product. The shell, core apps, and underlying technologies are all designed with each other in mind, and provide a complete OS experience.

Desktops like GNOME have expanded their scope to cover most of the responsibilities of platforms, and are in effect platforms now, minus the OS part. They have a very clear vision of how the system should work, and app developers target them directly.

The elementary project has taken this development to its logical end point, and made its own vertically integrated OS and app store. This is why it’s the only “real” platform in the free software space at the moment.

GNOME has a relatively vibrant ecosystem of nice third party apps now, despite not being a complete platform (yet). This gives us a glimpse of the potential of this ecosystem.

Distributions, on the other hand, have not really changed since the 90s. They still do integration work on desktop components, package system and applications, set defaults, and make UX decisions. They still operate as if they’re making a product from independent components, even though the actual product work is happening at the desktop layer now.

This disconnect has led to tensions in many areas, which affect both the quality of the system user experience, and the health of the app ecosystem.

What’s interesting about this situation is that desktop developers are now in the same situation app developers have always been in. Unlike desktops, apps have always been complete products. Because of this they have always suffered from the fragmentation and disconnect between developers and users introduced by distribution packaging.

Grievances with the distribution model, which affect both app and desktop developers, include:

Release schedule: Developers don’t have control over the pace at which people get updates to their software. For apps this can mean people still get old versions of software with issues that were fixed upstream years ago. For desktops it’s even worse, because it means app developers don’t know what version of the platform to target, especially since this can vary wildly (some distributions release every 6 months, others every 2+ years).
Packaging errors: Distribution packaging is prone to errors because individual packagers are overloaded (often maintaining dozens or hundreds of packages), and don’t know the software as well as the developers.
Overriding upstream decisions: When distributions disagree with upstream decisions, they sometimes keep old version of software, or apply downstream patches that override the author’s intentions. This is very frustrating if you’re an app developer, because users never experience your app as you intended it to be. However, similar to the release schedule issue, it’s even worse when it happens to the core system, because it fragments the platform for app developers.
Distro Theming: App developers test with the platform stylesheet and icons, so when distributions change these it can break applications in highly visible ways (invisible widgets, unreadable text, wrong icon metaphors). This is especially bad for third party apps, which get little or no testing from the downstream stylesheet developers. This blog post explains the issue in more detail.

The Wrong Incentives

The reason for a lot of these issues is the incentives on the distribution side. Distributions are shipping software directly to end users, so it’s very tempting to solve any issues they find downstream and just ship them directly. But because the distributions don’t actually develop the software this leads to a number of other problems:

Perpetual rebasing: Any change that isn’t upstreamed needs to be rebased on every future version of the upstream software.
Incoherent user experience: Downstream solutions to UX problems are often simplistic and don’t fix the entire issue, because they don’t have the development resources for a proper fix. This leads to awkward half-redesigns, which aren’t as polished or thought-through as the original design.
Ecosystem fragmentation: Every downstream change adds yet another variable app developers need to test for. The more distributions do it, the worse it gets.

The Endless OS shell is a great example of this. They started out with vanilla GNOME Shell, but then added ever more downstream patches in order to address issues found in in-house usability tests. This means that they end up having to do huge rebases every release, which is a lot of work. At the same time, the issues that prompted the changes do not get fixed upstream (Endless have recently changed their strategy and are working upstream much more now, so hopefully this will get better in the future).

This situation is clearly bad for everyone involved: Distributions spend a ton of resources rebasing their patches forever, app developers don’t have a clear target, and end users get a sub-par experience.

So, what could we do to improve this? We’ll discuss that in part 2 of this series :)

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:

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.
App developers are trying hard to not do anything innovative or visual in their apps, because they know it will break with other stylesheets.
“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 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”.

They are very very close to Adwaita code-wise, and therefore much less likely to break.
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.
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.

“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.