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Comment by PixelForg | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I'm still using Gnome is because their UI is consistent plus it's easy to theme it as well(through Gradience), but I can't deny that I hate the CSD initiative. I'm eagerly waiting for the new Cosmic DE from PopOs!

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They (some prominent members of the gnome community) are pretty vocal about not wanting you to be able to use themes.

https://stopthemingmy.app/

While they've walked it back and said they're fine with tinkering the mechanisms they propose would make it much harder for tinkering.

My desire to theme my desktop has declined linearly with age (along with my general desire to spend time futzing around with things for no material gain). I suspect 99% of people follow the same path.

Did you actually bother reading any of the arguments on that page? They don't want distros to use themes because themes always break apps. This is unavoidable. There's no practical way to make those kind of themes in a way that won't break apps eventually. Tinkering is completely different from a distro shipping broken apps by default, it's understood that's your responsibility when you break everything yourself by tinkering after-the-fact. If you wonder why they might also make it harder for this kind of tinkering, it's because tinkerers also don't like to use something that will just break everything else!

Somehow kde manages to largely avoid that problem. It strikes me as trying to solve technical problems socially, almost as bad as trying to solve social problems technologically.

No it really doesn't. I've seen tons of Qt themes that break apps. Their theming system is similar to the design of GTK's, so it has most of the same problems. This isn't a technical problem, it's entirely a social problem: users want these themes but the same users are also under the false impression that you can ever have this type of theme that won't also break apps. When that isn't technically possible and it never will be.

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