After six months of development, GNOME 42 is here and it’s packed with some cool new features and enhancements for fans of the GNOME desktop environment. The biggest change in this major release is the porting of almost all default GNOME apps to the latest GTK4 toolkit and the libadwaita 1.0 library for a more modern look and faster performance.
This is a very odd release. There’s tons of great, valuable new features and improvements in here, and if it wasn’t for libadwaita, I’d be quite excited to upgrade my various GNOME installations the moment Fedora 36 becomes available. A new screenshot UI, updates to all the core applications, a ton of performance improvements, and a lot more.
Sadly, libadwaita is incredibly problematic. Virtually all of GNOME’s core applications now use libadwaita, which means they cannot be themed. They will all use the default refreshed Adwaita theme, and no matter what Gtk+ theme you install, you can’t change that. What makes matters worse, is that the various applications not yet ported over to libadwaita, such as Nautilus, will still use the old, pre-libadwaita Adwaita theme, meaning that even on a default installation without any custom themes, you’re going to have to deal with a very inconsistent user interface.
Even when all of GNOME’s core applications have been ported over to libadwaita, your desktop will still make use of countless regular Gtk+ applications that will look out of place compared to all the GNOME applications. The GNOME team of course hopes that every Gtk+ developer will adopt libadwaita – Cinnamon, Xfce, Cosmic, MATE be damned – but the odds of that happening are slim.
Libadwaita knowingly and willingly makes using GNOME a far less pleasurable experience, and the fallout of this boneheaded move will take years to recover from – if at all.
It’s Gnome’s normal 6 month release cycle. 42 is essentially 4.2.
Who was theming Gnome? Oh right, people who don’t do their job.
That remains to be seen.
Cinnamon, Xfce, Cosmic, and Mate aren’t part of the Gnome project.
Let’s recap….
System76 (Cosmic) and Solus didn’t do the work they said they would then got mad because someone else didn’t do the work for them. They stoked up the anti-Gnome crowd to create a bunch of smoke to cover up their ineptitude.
Xfce isn’t affected. Xfce is just getting around to finishing the Gtk3 port. Gnome and KDE applications have always looked odd, and that tradition will continue. Tradition! Best info on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/xfce/comments/q3gmd9/gtk4_and_the_future_of_xfce/
Mate is doing their own thing, and have forks of all the original Gnome 2 apps. I can’t find anything about how they’ve been affected. I’m going to guess applications looked weird anyway, and Mate users are deathly allergic to Gtk3+ and Qt5+, I’m assuming, so are very careful with the software they install.
I can’t find how Cinnamon is affected. They seem to be doing okay.
I think that Thom point was that differences in attitude to theming (expressed by either embracing libadwaita or not) between Gnome *and* GTK+ 3rd party application authors who also want to fit into non Gnome desktop environments, will prevent Gnome based application ecostystem from ever achieving visual consistency.
That’s a structural problem.
GTK and Gnome applications have traditionally been alien looking. Even back in the GTK2 days. KDE had the best integration with a bunch of compatibility hacks, but the GTK/Gnome apps never quite fit in. I remember having to dig around to figure out how to set Gnome settings when running Xfce because something popped up the horrible tan theme Gnome2 used like a decade ago.
The Gnome team also isn’t forcing people to use libadwaita. People don’t have to use it. They can use something else. libadwaita is to help people write applications.
libadwaita was supposed to have theming support, but the people who said they were going to add theme support didn’t write the code. The Gnome team hasn’t had time to add the feature, so it’s not as dire as the people screaming would like us to believe.
The elementaryOS team did the work they needed to support their Gnome based Pantheon DE, by the way. They are strongly in favor of libadwaita, by the way. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS#Pantheon_desktop_environment, https://blog.elementary.io/linux-experiment-interview-cassidy-james-blaede-gnome-themes-libadwaita/)
Well that’s a hot take. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a theme that doesn’t clash with one’s mood while working. I’m with Thom on this one: It’s a boneheaded solution to a non-problem.
The comment from Flatland_Spider is worded in a confusing manner. I originally interpreted it the way you did, but they further clarify below.
“System76 (Cosmic) and Solus didn’t do the work they said they would then got mad because someone else didn’t do the work for them.”
In other words, a group of people said they would implement theming and then they didn’t. So, “the people who were supposed to be theming GNOME didn’t do their job.”
+10 points for deciphering my scribbles.
Yeah, that’s a bad sentence. “don’t” should be “didn’t”. -10 Internet points for me.
A consistent, pleasant GUI where everything follows the HIG would be nice. The Gnome apps do pretty well, but third-party apps can be really bad.
This isn’t limited to Linux by the way. Windows and MacOS have the same problem. Native look and feel is even listed as a feature on some MacOS apps. XD
You’re right about that, and even obscure OSes like Haiku are affected by it. Plain old BeOS running plain old BeOS era native software was as close to consistent perfection as I’ve ever seen for a desktop GUI. Haiku, as great as it is, has strayed a bit from that aesthetic. I still love it, but modern ideas are creeping in and ruining the whole effect.
Morgan,
Maybe this can be fixed with artificial intelligence?
Garbage in -> consistent perfection out
What? if i theme my system it means i don’t do my job? What a wierd (and kinda stupid) thing to say.
It’s amazing how Windows XP and Windows Vista got theming right years ago, but today it’s some kind of unsolvable problem that’s plauging UIs everywhere.
Any Windows app that uses the native theming engine (such as Qt4 apps) will have a native look and feel in Windows. It’s why you see VLC have 3D buttons in Windows 7 but flat buttons in Windows 10. The only apps that don’t look native are apps that use line-drawing to fake the UI elements.
Even Windows is moving away from consistent theming, as you can see the “Modern” styles from Windows 8.1 in Windows 10.
And that’s what happens when you let kids loose without a senior (actually senior as in old) designer in the team.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/
That picture proves my point: All the “classic” windows to the left may implement different UI guidelines but at least the UI elements look consistent because they are using the same theming engine (save for the Windows XP icons because the lazy people at Redmond couldn’t design a new icon). Now look to the right just how disparate all the “modern” stuff looks.
But hey, we can always re-design the UI, just open a ticket about it and add it to the backlog…
To be fair, there’s a broader problem here: resolution.
In the past, we could assume that all displays would have the same 96dpi everywhere and be fine with it. Theming and widget programming is easier when you can go full non-resizable bitmap with everything.
That’s was the logic behind the skeuomorphic UI used on iPhone till iOS 6 for example.
But then, HiDPI arrived, first on phones and tablets, and now on PCs.
Given that “convergence” crap from a decade ago, that preached that the same application and UI conventions should be used on all devices (a HUGE, MASSIVE, mistake slowly being undone that devastated usability on desktop computers), began to take root, a move towards resolution independent desktop widgets advanced.
What’s the easiest, no effort, way to archive resolution independence? By making everything “flat” as possible, no 3D widgets, no bitmapping, no theming other than MAYBE allowing to change color (given that with those “plain” styles, a mistake with colors can make buttons vanish). So you can make the widgets somewhat behave like a vector graphic.
And that’s how we ended in the current dismal and boring usability situation that we have on pretty much all modern desktops.
Avalon (WPF) is DPI scalable and all icons can be SVG. There is nothing in the Vista and 7 theme that is not DPI-scalable. Win32 apps are not scalable by default, but that’s independent of the theme used.
That’s unfortunately correct. There is a big conflict of interest between app developers and OS vendors. An OS developer wants the app to “blend-in” to the OS. An app developer wants their app to be 1) recognizable and 2) the same on every screen for branding and familiarity reasons (and so they don’t have to design multiple entirely different UIs). Hence the whole move to “flat” designs and UI elements that are mostly squares and circles.
(BTW you shouldn’t use bitmaps anyway. Use SVG. Bitmaps are one thing I am glad to see go away)
But that was not my complaint. My complaint was that when I come across a desktop OS, I expect the OS itself to be optimized for desktop (aka mouse) use and also feature a consistent theme for its own screens and any bundled apps that are part of the “default experience”.
Current Windows and Gnome fail massively on both.
kurkosdr,
Yea, ideally in this day and age all applications should be reactive and use DPI independent fonts and vector graphics. But even failing that the bitmaps should be of high enough quality that they don’t becoming a blurry mess when scaled up to higher resolutions. 32×32 doesn’t cut it anymore.
I don’t like the modern windows theme, honestly I’d still use the w2k classic that MS included until windows 8. I haven’t used Gnome since gnome3 and wasn’t a fan then, although I haven’t tried gnome 4. I’m on KDE now, but I like xfce too. Xfce doesn’t have the resources of the others, but maybe that’s a plus because they they won’t try to change everything up on their users, haha.
“Windows XP and Windows Vista got theming right years ago,”
LOL. What? XP just had 2 themes: boxy classic or Fisher Price. And Vista just had transparency if the GPU allowed it. Other than that the best you could do to “theme” the UI was changing some of the colors.
@kurkosdr
I started reading that thinking you were nuts, then realized you were talking about the applications blending, vs Windows actually supporting themes. It doesn’t and never has without 3rd party software.
From the whole shenanigans and fear spread about libadwaita, there were some articles that said specifically there would be theming added in, but likely not for the 1.0 release. So wait another 6 months or a year or whatever and things will likely be back to normal.
Of course I could always go with the ‘it is open source, hack it in yourself and upstream it, or fork!
From what I read, their plan is to implement color palette swapping (i.e. KDE’s Appearange > Colors control panel), not theming (i.e. KDE’s Appearance > Application Style control panel).
I believe their jargon for it is “the Adwaita recoloring API” or something along those lines. I know “recoloring” was the right word.
Ubuntu 22.04 has a nice patch in Appearance preferences – one can select an accent color (basically a selection color, but some icons are colorized, too). This is exactly a level of theming I need.
Well, I’m glad to see that’s working for you.
As a KDE user who is working to add a configuration UI to an application that uses PyGObject to access libwnck, I found it very irritating to have to walk through a minefield of GtkWindow subclasses, some of which obey the same theme as the base GtkWindow and the rest of my desktop and some of which hard-code a reset to Adwaita… including client-side window decorations with a very glaringly at-odds-with-the-rest-of-the-desktop drop shadow.
Every other project of mine is going PyQt these days to remain able to harmonize with non-GNOME desktops and the only reason this one isn’t is that Qt doesn’t have a good libwnck equivalent. (Yeah, it’s a project that’s inherently going to die off as Wayland becomes more common, since it’s at odds with the Wayland security model to monkey-patch window tiling into a desktop in a compositor-agnostic manner.)
a little hint for theme lovers: you CAN still change the theme of libadwaita apps. Yes, the settings you set on gnome-tweaks for example are beeing ignored.
but if you set the environment variable GTK_THEME to the name of your prefered theme, all libadwaita apps use them.
thats a bad solution for theme hoppers, but great to get rid of those theme mixes.
more on this: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes/
Oh, yeah, because… GNOME is only for the source-code modifier who know how to change system variables. Who needs normal users that could adapt the UI to their needs in a easy way when you can force down their throats diabolical ways to modify something they could previously do easily?
But this is Linux, the users just have to… rtfm !
man theme
yeah, it’s like a fucking joke… i personally only use gnome because i need some touch screen optimization that for example KDE doesn’t have :/
Huh? I have 42 in one machine, and gnome-tweaks theme settings seem to work just fine.
macOS does not have theming and it is fine. I would even argue that is an advantage to have a single, well-thought out, well-maintained theme for an (eventually) consistent look and feel across the desktop. So I am all for what Gnome is doing and hope they get as many people and projects on board as possible.
MS-DOS does not have theming either but that doesn’t mean it is “fine”. That only means it is “theme-less” and people CAN NOT adapt to their likes and are FORCED to use the default or start hacking the OS…
Gnome goes the same way apple was walked on…. It was possible for older releases of macOS – when it was called “Mac OS X” – and worked quite well.
take a look: https://twitter.com/MacintoshThemes (mixed with old Mac OS Classic themes)
I think you mean that MacOS doesn’t have user-switcable theming. I doubt an app that looks brushed metal in the brushed metal versions of OS X still looks like brushed metal in latest MacOS 11. Unless the app is faking the native theme with line-drawing.
Compare and contrast to Windows 11, where you have UI elements from 2 previous generations of “modern” each looking like the 2 previous versions of Windows.
The GNOME project kinda always leeched UI guidelines and feel from Apple, and not even the good parts of it…
But on Linux I must say: users can always vote with their feet and go somewhere else.
The real problem here is that other than KDE, LxQT and to a lesser extent XFCE, all desktops on Linux are just GNOME Shell variants, using GNOME applications for pretty much everything.
Frankly? These “shell desktops” should not complain. In the end, it was their choice to just hook on GNOME project for everything. In a open source project, who has the commit access is who has the final say.
Quote: “The biggest change in this major release is the porting of almost all default GNOME apps to the latest GTK4 toolkit and the libadwaita 1.0 library for a more modern look and faster performance.”
Let me rephrase that: “The biggest change in this minor release is the porting of some default GNOME apps to the latest GTK4 toolkit and the libadwaita 1.0 library for a theme lockdown and faster performance only in modern hardware (lower hardware buy new one).”
There you go.
yeah… it’s nearly impossible to use Gnome out of the box for example on ARM powered board like the Raspberry Pi 4. But this was also true for Gnome 3.x.
it’s really terrible how much system resources it needs.
It’s funny how GNOME 2.x folks used to point fingers on KDE in the past as being too heavy on resources just to become worse than it with GNOME 3.
I see that Linux still feels like a work in progress (only some of the apps use new theme, while others use the old one)
It seems Linux is always at a point where parts are transitioning from one thing to another. You’re always waiting for that point where everything and everyone will be on the “new thing” and yet it never happens. There is always another new (not always better: libadwaita) thing that Linux/Gnome/KDE are in the middle of moving to
I think it’s a generational problem. New waves of developers want to make their mark and introduce new technologies and visions. With time the old ones depart (due to burnout, live circumstances) and the new wave takes over and change the projects direction. It’s not a problem inherent to OSS but with its decentralized nature it gets more visible.
That is just legacy stuff pilling up. The same also happens with Windows and Mac.
It just happens that things move a lot faster on Linux, so this kind of issue pile up faster.
It’s also happening publicly in realtime rather then behind closed doors.
I switched to KDE due to not agreeing anymore with GNOME views and actions. I realized that i should have done that much sooner. KDE is basically the best DE currently in existence. That is if you want to continue use the desktop metaphor. A feature full and mature one. Not even Windows has that anymore. Now that i don’t have to be affected by the way GNOME conduct business. Now i must say that it is easier for me to say good luck to you GNOME and thanks for your all hard work.
KDE users are like the Vegans of the FOSS world…
Juicy vegans.
Too much plasma….
I use KDE and you don’t see me saying… dammit!
I started out using LXDE and was a happy user for years, but at some point playing around I broke my configuration so I figured it was time to move on since LXDE development is dead. I looked around, and I figured I would give GNOME a try since it does follow a differnet desktop paradigm. After a month, I had to move over to KDE because GNOME just wasn’t for me. It always felt like I was working on a mobile device versus a standard workstation…this included the eventual hack to just get some color in the UI. In addition, I felt like I spent more time searching for what I wanted versus just getting work done. If GNOME works for you, great, but it sure didn’t work for me where KDE was just like being home again. I wish the GNOME team luck, but I doubt I will ever be in your camp.
I think the secret to gnome is simple, ignore it is there. And that is what a DE should be. It should just be in the background and help you launch the programs you actually USE. If the desktop environment gets in your way, then it is designed incorrectly. Let’s take Windows 10.. there is some shortcut that I will randomly hit that minimizes all of my Windows… I have no idea what I hit to do it, but it irritates me every time because then I have to click on every window to bring it back up from the task bar… windows 11, it just randomly changes how the right click menu opens… these are bad designs. Gnome’s lack of easy theming in the UI is not really something on this level of failure. Also, setting an environment string in a text file is not on the level of hacking source code… this usually means the developers are working on a UI for it eventually.
I would agree to ignore the DE, but the DE is the road you have to travel to get to the apps every single time. Here is just one of the examples that I didn’t like. I have a three monitor setup with various (seven currently and my times more for reference documents) windows open spread across the three monitors in various states of overlapping. I step away for a moment and when I come back, just which window has focus…I have no idea because there are zero cues. This treating all windows the same makes it feel like I am using a tablet where it makes all windows maximized so visual cues aren’t required. Again, I get that this might just be me, but I just don’t get where GNOME is coming from other than lets be like a tablet. Plus I even have issues with KDE because it feels all to “flat” to me: I like bright colors…not a fan of muted colors. As I said, to each his own, but GNOME is a no-go for this old guy.
I blacklist gtk*, libgnome and libadwaita anyways so i do not by chance install any application that relies on them.
I would be more comfortable with this if I didn’t feel like Adwaita was such a clunky, ugly, awkward theme. To my eyes it combines the worst of both Clearlooks era rubber/plastic looking themes, and MacOS/Materia/Windows 10 flatness obsession. That’s pure opinion though, IDK how most users feel about Adwaita.
Color scheming would definitely make it more pleasant (esp. if the schemes could be cross-applied to Qt apps), but really stuff like this is part of why I gave up and switched to KDE, despite the still numerous bugs with KWin and Plasma widgets under Wayland. Gnome devs seem to keep forgetting that a desktop is mainly a platform for other people’s apps.
(Meanwhile I’m hopeful that more desktops gradually transition to Wayland, with the help of compositor libraries like wlroots and smithay. X11 is just layers upon layers of dumpster fire, it’s legit dangerous to be running your desktop on it in this day and age.)
I’ve been a long time Fedora user, and happen to like Gnome 3, but I agree Adwaita isn’t particularly a good theme. It’s better then it’s been, but it’s not the best.
Elementary OS has a really nice theme. That team has done some good work on their UI.
once Wayland stops being alpha quality garbage I may change to it, til then its x11 cause x11 is leagues better then wayland still
https://endlessnow.com/images/DoesMyDistroPreferKDE-meme.png