Linux Mint looks to fork more GNOME Apps because of libAdwaita

Can't they theme gtk4/libadwaita without editing libadwaita? Like gradience do

I've made a bunch of libadwaita apps, because I like its UI/UX not because I want to break other Desktop Environment. That would mean even more fragmentation.

If they did you'd have one theme that works with Gnome and one that works with Mint. Both of which would be irrelevant to someone using GTK apps on, say, XFCE on Arch.
- Aren't mint themes gtk themes?

They could just accept GTK 4. Anyway, they will need some GTK 4/libadwaita support as there are an increasing number of apps that use it.

Hello fellow citizen, I almost agree but libadwaita is inherently gnome's thing, and libadwaita apps are usually closely built into the gnome desktop, so using it outside of gnome seems weird. Kinda like using Dolphin outside of KDE (tho that's just because of qt). They want to be able to integrate their forks visually.
I don't see libadadwaita as progress. Last week, simple-scan got an update and is stuck to a dark theme since then. To change it, i would have to install gnome-settings and klick a button there. Can't do that via my usual keyboard-combo.

edit: edited Gnome's 'don't theme our apps' away since it's beside the point.
- If you actually read through that they say theme away to your heart's content, just please don't report issues to the app developer, report it to the theme developer.
  
  They say that lots of time they could spend developing is managing and investigating bugs that end up being due to the user installing some random poorly-made theme, wasting precious dev time that they are donating for free.
  
  It's a perfectly reasonable request, and has no bearing on whether an app is proprietary or not.
  
  E: the guy above has drastically changed their comment so now mine probably doesn't make sense.
- The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that's where the setting actually resides. It's a pain to do, but that means it's possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.
  
  For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won't get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.
  
  It's currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.
  
  (In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn't recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)
  
  Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.
- You can use gradence to set a custom theme.

Once in a while I check the installed packages for a possible dependency on GTK and when I find a program which has one, I look for an alternative to have one dependency less.

The last time I replaced simple-scan with skanlite and it is a much much better scanning program and with a more pleasant ui on top.

For some reason it is not yet on Flathub
- Assuming you are using Mint, Skanlite can be found in the software manager.

Pretty reasonable

No way I'm gonna scroll this 15min article to spot where that's mentioned

TL;DR They want to push even more other desktop environments and distros to use XApps, because a lot of gnome's ex-gtk3 apps now are half-broken and looks alien inside Mint and other distros like Xubuntu.

If an application doesn’t support Cinnamon we can’t ship with it in our Cinnamon edition. The same goes for MATE and Xfce.
[...]
We could do like Ubuntu 24.04. They provide a finished product with a high level of integration. The way they do that is by modifying libAdwaita to support their theme: Yaru. We could do the same with Mint-Y. It would make all GNOME applications look nice in Linux Mint, but we’d have to remove theme selection, since it would only work with Mint-Y. In the long term it wouldn’t solve the main issue either: These applications are designed for a desktop which is more and more different to ours by the day. It’s not just a question of themes or look. Today these apps are losing menubars, themes, tomorrow they might come with no minimize button or anything GNOME doesn’t use.

Gnome might as well be proprietary with their shit attitude.

All I want is the ability to disable client side decorations without having to force xwayland with gtk3-classic

How are they going to stop using zenity? it is a dependency of steam. And right now the gtk4 version needs a bunch of hacks to follow the system theme as well.

Deleted by user.

It's basically GNOME specific version of GTK4. There are various issues that arise from that but one of the main ones is that it is not themeable at all at present. The GNOME adiwaita theme is built into the library and is the only theme.

It is supposedly going to have a themeing system but it will still break with existing GTK themes.

As the Mint blog alludes to, it also embeds fundamental UI choices that may make sense for GNOME but may be jarring or out of place in other desktops such as Cinnamon, or XFCE. They cite the example that GNOME could unilaterally remove the minimise button from the apps because it's not something that exists in GNOME.

There is a concern that it effectively breaks the existing app ecosystem and will deviate further and further from the established GTK norms. To be fair is kinda what it's supposed to do - I think it's it's supposed to be a better replacement that allows GNOME to forge it's own path.

Edit: worth noting that the Mint blog post says they could make their own theme within their own version of the library but it could only fit with one GTK fheme. So it can be customise in a limited distro level way but still can't follow the basic themeing across the desktop if you chose anything else (at present).
- To be honest, I'm kind of afraid that Linux will go the day of Windows with zero UI consistency because of apps that can't be themed to even look vaguely similar or may even take over the window decorations.
  
  I kinda liked it more when gtk-qt was still a thing and you could actually get a semi-unified look for the while environment.
- How does Gradience works then?
- Yes, the minimize button can go away as soon there is an extension that re-adds it for users running gnome classic (a set of gnome shell extensions which includes a classic task bar).

The enshitification of Gnome continues until it be it's own little isolated thing and previous gnome code will have to be forked to make progress that users actually want.

That will probably go for gnome apps eventually. The Mint guys might have to rewrite all the bloody apps to work with gnome 3....🤦

Enshitification != when a DE has some theming for its apps I don't like.

"Enshitification" must be the most misused buzzword in the tech space right now. That or every algorithm being "AI" now.
- How about when the theming is baked in and impossible to change?
  
  Enshittification doesn't have to be monetary. It's about doing things that go against the interests of the user.
  
  Unfortunately Gnome has taken to heart St. Exupery's law ("perfection is not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away") but have forgotten that it was coined in an era of mechanical devices and there's more than one aspect to software. Applying it to functionality is very different from applying it to features and customization. The latter ends up making software feel bland and oppressive.
- No. It's deliberately breaking backwards compatibility to force other projects that use that code to either look bland like Gnome or stop making their DE's.
  
  That's bad for FLOSS and Linux users
Didn't that happen a long time ago which is how we got MATE?

I no longer follow developments in GTK based DEs much because nowadays KDE Plasma is so clearly the best choice for me, but it has long been my impression that GNOME just wants to be its own thing that doesn't really care about anyone not using GNOME. This is probably because the main role of GNOME is to be the DE for installations commercially supported by Canonical, Red Hat, etc.
- From what others have replied, this seems to be an old issue and it seems Gnome was actually in the right.
  
  I wasn't aware of that history. Here's the reply that helped straighten it out: https://lemmy.world/comment/9847230
It’s not up to GNOME to do others work for them. If Mint wants a specific styling for their desktop, they should fork it (which they’re already doing) since everything is open source. It’s not like GNOME is gonna hunt them down for forking and creating a new product altogether lmfao. Cut the crap.
- Gnome Foundation likes to think of themselves as the pioneer in DE's and the default choice for Linux. Which was true for a long time. Cinnamon and Mate run Gnome, for example. I'm not sure about XFCE.
  
  If you're THE leading DE project at least try to accommodate those DE's that depend on your code or meet with them to inform them well in advance and discuss the best options for those DE's.
  
  In other words, work together for the good of all users instead of doing your own little thing in the corner and leave the others to deal with the mess you made....