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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

GNOME didn't break because its theme was effectively blessed, being updated roughly in lockstep with GTK. However, not every user of GTK exists inside of GNOME. Consider:

- An app running in Windows or macOS

- An app running inside of KDE or another desktop environment

While the Adwaita theme certainly looks OK, having it be the only stable option is beyond absurd, and makes GTK 3 useless for anyone outside of GNOME, including GIMP, which I believe ironically was the origin of GTK itself to begin with.

While I can't think of another example of where GTK broke other than theming, that doesn't really make it OK. Marking it unstable may effectively cover their ass for fulfilling their promises, but in my opinion that's ridiculous for an aspect of the library that literally can't be ignored.

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GNOME doesn't have it's own theme, it uses whatever GTK uses, i.e. Adwaita by default. Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all.

The reason why theming was unstable is, that it was being reimplemented. That's a thing you cannot do overnight, it takes some time. So if you want a theme that is not adwaita, you have to do exactly the same thing that the adwaita people did: update it for each release. Yes, that takes time too.

Doing things in explicitly marked unstable internals of any framework will get you the authors protecting themselves against you. In Windows, the theme authors got signed themes, in MacOS they got SIP. Yes, it is not a insurmountable problem to avoid both, that's not their purpose, but when something breaks, it is obvious who's fault it is.

GIMP is still Gtk 2 app, so it wasn't concerned with broken theming at all. They have their own work to do with the switch to GEGL.

>> Gnome Shell, which is one of the few parts that does have it's own theming, doesn't use GTK at all.

https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/blob/1f03599d1cf888f73a...

Seems to me that "#include <gtk/gtk.h>" means that gnome-shell does use gtk. Or maybe I am missing some nuance of your statement.

It uses it very little, and specifically doesn't use GTK for theming. Its widgets and the scene graph handling are written using Clutter, not GTK.

GNOME Shell uses its own widget toolkit called ST. GTK+ APIs are pretty good about sebsible names, so you could grep though the source for gtk_ to see which GTK+ functionality is actually used by the shell.

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