On the 26th of August, in less than 2 weeks, I (Tio) will go to Prague for the last ZDay event. ZDay, or Zeitgeist Day, is a global yearly event organized by the Zeitgeist Movement (TZM). It is meant to invite people from all around the world to present similar ideas to those that Zeitgeist stands behind. TROM started soon after the Zeitgeist Movement sparked into existence as the activism arm of The Venus Project. Our views are very similar and we are heading towards the same direction.
TZM will stop organizing these ZDay events because it tries to decentralize itself. So this will be the last ZDay, therefore I thought it would be a shame to never have participated in this event, so I contacted the organizers and asked if I can come. They were very familiar with TROM and happy to have me there. We've just released a new documentary so this is a perfect timing for such a presentation.
The event will be in Prague at the Spojka Karlín Events on 26th this month. It will start on 12:00 and end at 18:00. There will be 6 speakers in total. 4 will do their presentations in Czech and 2 in English (one of them is me). This is the official website for the event zeitgeistmovement.cz/2023/07/1…
All of the presentations will be translated live via personal headphones that the audience can wear. The event can host up to 120 people and over 50 seats are already booked. In order to participate you have to book here cloud.tzm.community/apps/forms…
It does not cost money to participate.
My talk will be called "How to Grow a Saner Society. A Lifetime Adventure." and I will try to keep it more positive. I will talk about our trade-free approach, the TROM.tf project, and a lot more. But I will try to put it all in a new unique perspective. The talk will be 30-40 minutes long and it will be recorded. We will upload it to our Peertube whenever it will be available.
This is a first for me, so let's see how it goes. If you want to meet up, please come to the Prague event if you can! 5 of us from TROM will be there including Roma, Aaron, Vicky and Rafa.
TROM II: A Message to the Aliens Year: 2023 / Duration: 4 parts, 5 hours We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires.
If people think that TROMjaro is "just another distro" then they don't know what they are talking about. Here's a sample of what we pushed recently to make the desktop experience better than most "distros" that I know, perhaps there is none that deals with theming and HiDPI, and fonts, and consistency and more in a better way than TROMjaro.
You know I watched one of the latest videos from @Nick @ The Linux Experiment where he talks about theming the Flatpaks. So complicated for the average user. Guess what!? We do it better and automatically, and we also sync GTK with QT, and fonts, and icons. If only more people would take a serious look at TROMjaro and by all means use the changes we made for your distro!
Tomorrow we will release a cool new TROMjaro ISO :) - if I team with @Rokosun and @Roma we create cool shit :) - you'll see.
Also, am working on the ZDay presentation. So far so good. I LOVE the LibreOffice Presentation. So bloody cool. I will send a newsletter about the ZDay event tomorrow or the day after. I was waiting for the organizers to send me the official "promo" for me....but they are busy with personal stuff so I would send a newsletter even without that. It is fine, just that on their website zeitgeistmovement.cz/2023/07/1… that leads to a FB event for ZDay my name is not listed, so some people may think that it is not confirmed. But it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ1YHH6qw5E Rádi bychom Vás všechny pozvali na patnáctý a poslední výroční Globální Zeitgeist-Day 2023 v Praze v České Republice. Zaměřením této výroční konference udrž
@Dima I was watching the video, very well made, but at one point when they were talking about bringing more tourists I was like ahhhh damn....sounds good for them now, but fuck this will definitely ruin things in the long run. Then came your commentary about this society and trade and how this will fuck things up in the future. And I was like YAH Dima! Great!
Great job at showcasing these things, to combine the great work that these people do, but also more relevant commentary from you.
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@Dima I was watching the video, very well made, but at one point when they were talking about bringing more tourists I was like ahhhh damn....sounds good for them now, but fuck this will definitely ruin things in the long run. Then came your commentary about this society and trade and how this will fuck things up in the future. And I was like YAH Dima! Great!
Great job at showcasing these things, to combine the great work that these people do, but also more relevant commentary from you.
@Dima continues his volunteering adventures, showcasing how we can do better at restoring the nature and helping people. But also why we should seriously think about changing the foundation of our society if we are to have any long term positive impact.
Thank @Tio . I knew you going to like it :) haha. But yeah that was my disappointment when I was at this camp, that they really hope for the tourism. And i tried to speak about it with them about the trade and future problems, but no luck. On the other hand there are no other options to stop this Hydropower otherwise. Locals are brainwashed that power plant will be good for them, so tourists maybe the only alternative for now, to convince them otherwise. Anyway it's a mess and a lot of corruption.
The TROM II Documentary is by far the most complex, long lasting, and important project I ever created and maybe I will ever create tromsite.com/documentaries/tro… - 3 years to make. A massive work. And I am so happy with the end result, I feel like I can retire now :).
But I will do the opposite and continue to create more stuff.
Anyway, if anyone has any interest in what I do, then I cannot recommend this documentary enough! #tromstuff
Thanks! XFCE is terrible looking as default, and it has a lot of other inconsistencies in regards to theming and working with QT apps. We fixed many things. For example the system theming is now used by all GTK apps, including libadwaita, byt all QT apps, and even by all GTK flatpaks, even those using libadwaita. Same is the case for icons and fonts. Consistency.
Plus many changes in the background to make things more simple and easy to use.
These days we had to do a lot of coding, and because @Rokosun 's computer broke and he can only help from his phone, I tried to use chatGPT to help me with that. We are working hard on TROMjaro to push a new release with many fixes and improvements. Here are my thoughts about the bot's coding abilities:
It is impressive! And impressively stupid! At times it is shocking how good it is at interpreting what you throw at it. Like code plus normal language in one go. Great at explaining pieces of code too. BUT unless you yourself know how to code, you can't use this motherfucker. It messed up pretty much all of the coding very badly to the point of making it a disaster to use. Sure, a few times it spotted some syntax errors.....
However if it weren't for @Rokosun who is amazing at coding, then I would have been lost and tricked by the bot. I even did a quick experiment just
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These days we had to do a lot of coding, and because @Rokosun 's computer broke and he can only help from his phone, I tried to use chatGPT to help me with that. We are working hard on TROMjaro to push a new release with many fixes and improvements. Here are my thoughts about the bot's coding abilities:
It is impressive! And impressively stupid! At times it is shocking how good it is at interpreting what you throw at it. Like code plus normal language in one go. Great at explaining pieces of code too. BUT unless you yourself know how to code, you can't use this motherfucker. It messed up pretty much all of the coding very badly to the point of making it a disaster to use. Sure, a few times it spotted some syntax errors.....
However if it weren't for @Rokosun who is amazing at coding, then I would have been lost and tricked by the bot. I even did a quick experiment just now for the past hours. I would send tasks to both GPT and @Roma to help with a piece of code :). The bot was MUCH faster. And a total disaster. Roma was slower, but to the point. And much nicer haha. Roma did it eventually, and we could properly test stuff.
In all, these bots can be useful at spotting some syntax errors and small things like that, and perhaps help with some easy coding. But only good coders can use such bots. And that's the thing. These motherfuckers are no match for humans yet, even when it comes to coding.
Anyway, we should release a new TROMjaro soon, to then focus on the ZDay presentation. #tromstuff
You may see it working, but if you cannot check the code it can, and it will be risky. We tested it a lot and I'm telling you, and @Rokosun and @Roma can confirm, that it will mess things up and invent a lot of BS code. So these tools, at least for now, need to always be checked by humans. And we tried simple code, imagine if it were to create a complex code with different layers....no way.
@avi917 I will say that you can use chatGPT to code if you want to, and the code can work for you as well, but like Tio said the issue here is that if you don't know how to code then you can't review or understand what chatGPT gave you. For example, when Tio used AI to write code and then later when I checked it there was a function that was never used at all - basically a pile of unused code that does nothing but sits there. AI feels a lot like rolling a dice.
@avi917 If you don't care about clean code and just want something to get done then maybe AI works for you, its success rate depends on the complexity/uniqueness of the task you wanna get done, in the worst case scenario it can give you harmful code - tho it's statistically less likely to happen. The fact that you had to go through this tedious process of back and forth to get your code working is why I said it's like rolling a dice - again and again until it finally works.
Working very hard on TROMjaro these days. We want to make it a bit better visually and in terms of consistency and fix some bugs. The Layout and Theme switchers are getting some improvements. I hope to be done in less than 7-10 days to then have time for my ZDay presentation preparation. ;)
I will share more about the ZDay, is just that I was busy with TROMjaro. #tromstuff
Our TROM Call has been restored because we figured out why it stopped working after a while - https://call.trom.tf/
TROM Call (Jitsi) is a complete Zoom alternative, but a lot better because there are no restrictions. No registrations needed, no participants limit or duration of the call. Plus a lot more features.
We hope that now it will work well. Give it a try! #tromlive
We've recently had a discussion over here social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4… about how Thunderbird's update is in fact not that "cool", but less functional, and how the theming and window managing is starting to become more broken on Linux because many developers seem to not think of their apps in terms of usability and respecting the user's choices and their system.
@Nick @ The Linux Experiment here's why not respecting the user choices via their system (theming, fonts, window manager), is a bad idea.
We've recently had a discussion over here social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4… about how Thunderbird's update is in fact not that "cool", but less functional, and how the theming and window managing is starting to become more broken on Linux because many developers seem to not think of their apps in terms of usability and respecting the user's choices and their system.
@Nick @ The Linux Experiment here's why not respecting the user choices via their system (theming, fonts, window manager), is a bad idea.
We've recently had a discussion over here social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4… about how Thunderbirdßs update is in fact not that "cool", but less functional, and how the theming and window managing is starting to become more broken on Linux because many developers seem to not think of their apps in terms of usability and respecting the user's choices and their system.
It’s always the same argument: power users feel they’re losing access to customization, the rest of the world applauds more coherency and better design.
I still stand in the corner of regular users who don’t theme and don’t use window managers, and thus will have 100% better experience than before the update.
The fact is: if you need to customize, you still can and you know how. If you don’t care, your experience is simpler. It’s a win in my book.
You are not a "power user" if all you want is to select a particular theme and expect it to work with at least most of the system. Or a font size...
All "regular" users use Window Managers. XFCE has one, Gnome has another. Maybe the wording is confusing, but what I meant is the system that draws the windows graphically. And that is not respected by apps like Thunderbird.
I fail to see where's a better design and coherency, else I would applaud it too.
The fact is: if you need to customize, you still can and you know how.
Well can you tell me how to fix Thunderbird? I have no clue :)
I think you brush aside too quickly the trend of fragmentation in the Linux world, with Gnome caring only about Gnome, thunderbird about their app, and so forth. Destroying in the process useful features that are system wide. I do not understand how you do not see system theming as important, or font choosing, or HUD-like features. They are useful for everyone.
You know probably most users do not use Workspaces, but probably you do. How would yo
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You are not a "power user" if all you want is to select a particular theme and expect it to work with at least most of the system. Or a font size...
All "regular" users use Window Managers. XFCE has one, Gnome has another. Maybe the wording is confusing, but what I meant is the system that draws the windows graphically. And that is not respected by apps like Thunderbird.
I fail to see where's a better design and coherency, else I would applaud it too.
The fact is: if you need to customize, you still can and you know how.
Well can you tell me how to fix Thunderbird? I have no clue :)
I think you brush aside too quickly the trend of fragmentation in the Linux world, with Gnome caring only about Gnome, thunderbird about their app, and so forth. Destroying in the process useful features that are system wide. I do not understand how you do not see system theming as important, or font choosing, or HUD-like features. They are useful for everyone.
You know probably most users do not use Workspaces, but probably you do. How would you feel if Gnome, or app developers, would make it nearly impossible to use their apps or systems with workspaces?
Anyway, I thought you could pay a bit more attention to things like usability since from what I remember from some of your videos, you say that you work/have worked within that domain.
Usability is how an app works and how it’s features are accessible. In that regard, Thunderbird has made strides. Linux apps in general, have made strides.
Supporting every change the user might make on any distro isn’t usability. It’s impossible. It never worked well. It didn’t work well in 2006 when I started using Linux. It was disjointed, half broken, and completely unstable. It still doesn’t work well today. It never will.
Nick how is a good usability if the window buttons of app X are widely different form the system's window buttons, and a times have more or less buttons or in a different part of the titlebar? Or, if the app X has a completely different theme than the system's theme? Should the user tweak the settings for each individual app if the fonts are too big or too small?
No one said they need to support every change the user wants, let's not exaggerate. They only need to make sure their apps properly define their elements so others can customize them. From my knowledge the reason some new apps like Gnome's cannot use HUD like features is because they do not define their menus properly.
You know I struggled so much to custom theme Calamares. Why? Their elements do not have proper selector. From my knowledge that's one of the main reasons these new apps cannot be properly customized.
The system wide features should be implemented by your system. It’s not up to the app to support your window manager, it’s up to your window manager to add a title bar to apps that don’t use one.
It’s up to your global menu to detect menus from an app, there’s no API on Linux to do that, (there are hacks). It ‘s up to your theme to theme your apps, since there’s no API to theme apps on Linux, whatever the desktop you use. Pin this on the desktop or the distro, not the app.
The system cannot draw a window around an app that does not allow that. When Gnome mushes the titlebars with menus and buttons, probably it becomes very hard if not impossible for the system to do anything about it. I do not know the details for sure, but if you are saying it is the DEs that are at fault here, then are you for sure knowing that or just say that? Because I would be interested to talk to the right people about this.
For example for libadwaita one has to use a fork of libadwaita in order to allow the system to theme these apps. And the fork, form my knowledge, needs to tell libadwaita to not force their own theme. So, is this an issue with Gnome and their library, or the system?
For apps, I know for certain that the system can draw a titlebar onto an app: Kwin for example can add a titlebar and window border around an app that doesn’t have one. Davinci Resolve on Linux has no titlebar, Kwin can add one back if you so choose, in the settings.
As for Libadwaita, it was never designed to be themed, but it can be. You can still replace the css with something else. For packaged apps, flatpaks, I’ve done it. It’s just more clearly unsupported ;)
what if your desktop environment doesn't need the same window decorations as others? I3 doesn't need close/min/max buttons for example, but when an application adds them instead of relying on the window manager it takes up space on the desktop and makes things look disjointed
Expecting a cross platform app to support every feature from every desktop and every OS is pretty weird.
If you want an email client that works with all the features of your desktop, use the email client your desktop has. Geary, Kmail, Evolution, whatever else. Thunderbird was never and probably never will be this well integrated because, let’s be honest, Linux doesn’t have the APIs to allow that.
You keep on saying that we expect for an app to support DE specific features :) and I never said that. An app has some protocols that OSes can use, such as notifications, or the ability for the system to wrap the app in a window in order for users to resize, close, etc.. I would say exporting the menus should also be on the list. That's what I'm talking about.
Think of websites. I make one with my own design. But people can use chrome or firefox to access it, and their browsers look the way the users wants, not enforced by my website. Now websites have protocols that allow for the visitor's system to theme the website (make it dark or light and even add their accent colors). Is to "allow" not to "provide" more than anything ;).
You’re talking about an API, something well defined that works in the same way for each browser.
Linux doesn’t have that for theming or global menus. It has that for notifications, which is why most programs, even cross platform, implement notifications.
For window borders, same, we don’t have one single standard, so the app picks the one it prefers. Here, it’s client side decoration.
The use similar libraries so elements can be similar and well defined. This is why they can be themed. Yes they do nit have an API for theming or window decorations or menus. I think they should. At least not make it more difficult for others to theme them.
I am talking about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-s… - Gnome is going full on on that. Meaning the client, the app itself, draws the window decorations and not the system. This is a bad idea as I explained multiple times. It means the app decides the borders, window buttons, titlebar, shadow, and functionalities such as effects and so forth. If you have 100 different ones doing this, you'll have 100 slightly different apps in terms of how they look and behave.
It’s actually a good idea because it means it enforces cohesion on how an app works on the same toolkit and with the same HIG. It also gives control to app developers to build apps that work how they want them to, and gives them more freedom for creativity.
It’s only an issue if you see Linux as the app ecosystem, instead of seeing each desktop as its own ecosystem. Linux is NOT the platform. The DE is. It was always the case, 20 years ago, and still today.
It enforces cohesion withing 1 single app. Or in the case of Gnome within a bunch of apps. That's the best it can be achieved. Which is not good at all. You will, at best, have different themes and different looking apps for your system. An app does not work unless it is within an OS. If the app developers do not care about the OS then they do not care about their app.
At least they can let the system draw the window decorations to provide a sane consistency for the user. So that the user knows that APPS live inside BOXES (windows). And these boxes can be managed by the system. Effects, window buttons and features.
Having similar title bars doesn’t make apps look coherent. A KDE app will never look like a GNOME app. It’s fake cohesion. Not the same HIG, not the same theme or look. Skin deep at most.
In the end it’s more confusing for people to have things that look alike and don’t work in the same way, apart from the title bars.
The ecosystem is the DE, not Linux as a whole. Apps fit the DE.
GTK3, GTK4, Libadwaita, QT. Which one is which? Coherent theming across all. Unfortunately with a bunch of "hacks" because of Gnome/Libadwaita mostly. And yet Thunderbird is the odd goose.
if your setup ruins the usability of an application that was not tested on your setup, you should pin the blame more on your setup rather than the application that was not expecting your setup to behave how it does, and then fix it
and in the case of themes, i want to point out that even libadwaitia can be themed although its unsupported and you shouldn't report any bugs that result from you doing that
App developers should respect the system in regards to some basic functions such as notifications, theming, window decorations, fonts. By respecting I mean to make sure they properly define their elements so that the system knows how to interpret them.
If elements are well defined then the system can work with that. If Gnome decides to mush the titlebar into something different then they are the ones breaking the system. If it was easy for the system to interpret that new approach probably they would.
most of that is the job of the framework they are using rather than the application itself
things break because applications aren't expecting the framework to not behave how they expect it to because someone modified the framework by either theming it or changing some other aspect of it
I do webdesign. People also use different browsers to access it. The CSS can be slightly interpreted differently by browsers. Plus people use addons. That being said for some the website may look broke, but it is easy for me to force them to say what browser they use and what addons. I do not expect to fix anything for any browser or addon.
Therefore when you make an app let others do whatever they want with it in terms of theming, but all I'm saying is define your elements well so that others can theme these apps. Or at least let the system draw the window decorations.
@dark Your system CAN force a theme or a window decoration. You can do it for Firefox, with custom CSS. You can also do it for thunderbird. Just don’t expect the app to give you the tools to completely break it yourself 😂
How can XFCE enforce a system side decoration for an app that has client side decorations? No one expects the app developer to do anything more than allowing fr the system to understand where is the titlebar and those window decorations.
In any case, the result is a fragmented Linux environment. You cannot deny it, Simply install a few QT, GTK and Libadwaita apps on any system and you'll see for yourself.
@dark That’s because you expect these apps to not look fragmented. They always did and they always will.
I use GNOME apps only, and a few that aren’t specifically made for it. My experience is 100% better today than it was 10 years, or 17 years ago. When I use KDE, I use KDE apps only. Use apps for your desktop. There is no coherency on Linux, there is DE coherency. You’re expecting something that never existed and will never exist.
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Try TROMjaro then. You can see that indeed you can have 90-95% of all apps be consistent with the system's theme, fonts, and icons. On XFCE. Unnecessary hard work to do all of these but Gnome is trying hard to make it difficult to continue to do so.
You keep on promoting the Linux is not a thing, it is KDE, Gnome, and what else? Well unfortunately that's what some of the people behind these DEs are also moving towards, which is terrible. Using Gnome and expecting to mostly install Gnome apps, is a terrible idea.
A Trade-Free operating system based on Manjaro Linux Designed for your brain, but you can install it on a computer.No more ads and trackers consuming you, no ‘free’ trials, noContinue readingHOME
A Trade-Free operating system based on Manjaro Linux Designed for your brain, but you can install it on a computer.No more ads and trackers consuming you, no ‘free’ trials, no …
Same here. Fundamental misunderstandings about what usability is vs « how the button looks » can’t be explained to someone who just wants to make things look superficially the same. They’ll never be the same, feel the same, look the same. They’ll be confusingly similar, but work so differently its even worse than having them themed differently.
It’s a common misconception that apparently can’t be reasoned with.
If you want to reason then you are missing 90% of my points. Here:
If apps do the window decorations (CSD) we end up with multiple styles (visually), different buttons (styles and positions), different icons, different fonts and font sizes, different position of the window buttons, different titlebars. If you think that having 50 apps that look in 30 ways is the way to go, then your understanding of usability is indeed strange.
With CSD the functionality of a system is impaired. You may not be able to use the right click options on the titlebar, hide it, roll windows up, use certain borders or effects that can make your system more usable. These are at the mercy of the app itself. Users have no control, and very little and hacky when they try to do it themselves.
You ignore the magnificent HUD. Have you heard of it? This is not only one of the most productive features, but useful for people with impairments. To be able to search through every menu of every app, quickly, is an accessibility feature you
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If you want to reason then you are missing 90% of my points. Here:
If apps do the window decorations (CSD) we end up with multiple styles (visually), different buttons (styles and positions), different icons, different fonts and font sizes, different position of the window buttons, different titlebars. If you think that having 50 apps that look in 30 ways is the way to go, then your understanding of usability is indeed strange.
With CSD the functionality of a system is impaired. You may not be able to use the right click options on the titlebar, hide it, roll windows up, use certain borders or effects that can make your system more usable. These are at the mercy of the app itself. Users have no control, and very little and hacky when they try to do it themselves.
You ignore the magnificent HUD. Have you heard of it? This is not only one of the most productive features, but useful for people with impairments. To be able to search through every menu of every app, quickly, is an accessibility feature you cannot pretend to ignore.
If you want a system where apps look different from each other, from buttons to functionalities in terms of window managing and menus, then that itself is a description of bad usability.
I think that's 'more than just "how the button looks".
Even MacOS or Windows understand these simple notions and try to enforce them. Apple has a global menu that will not work with all apps, and that's ok it is still bloody useful. Windows apps have a very similar, if not the same titlebar and style.
Anyway. Very shallow input, I was expecting more. But I guess most people use their laptops for light task and may not see the inconsistency when we are at the mercy of Gnome and the like.
@dark Beeaks apps. Shipping apps looking and working differently than what the devs wanted. Erasing their brand identity by changing their icons.
Basically not good on all fronts. Screenshots of the app in the store don’t look like the app the user has, help pages don’t look like what the user gets… the list is endless. Don’t theme apps as a distro.
Ok Apple. I understood. We won't theme anything. Give us the icons and the apps, and we will embrace. :)
Even on Mac or Windows, my dear friend, there are themes and icon packs. I am not sure what OS world you want to see, but theming and customization won't go away. We better deal with that in a consistent way, rather than thinking that the solution is to have no customization.
This apply to web app too. I once tried an extension to force dark mode for consistency. Uninstalled five minutes later. Good UI design is complex and take time.
Websites are far more complex than apps simply because they have a lot of plugins and addons and modules that have custom css classes. Apps are usually a lot simpler. The share libraries and kits, so buttons, tabs, window buttons, and so forth are likely built very similarly and have similar or the same classes.
Except Microsoft Outlook, which I use once a year to prevent account d letion of this spambox I used when I was younger for untransferable account, I can't think of a complex website with a billion ressources to load. Good website take a design language and stick to it. Beside, while esoteric, css is much more powerfull and reliable for customization than most UI libraries. I've seen broken apps, and even if it is a custom UI, people complain to upstream.
@dark Fake consistency. Apps that sort of look alike but don’t feel part of a whole at all. You can’t make a GTK4 app look or feel like a KDE app.
In a screenshot, sure, in use? No way. It doesn’t work, it never has. Using GNOME and using only GNOME apps is how you get a coherent system. Or using KDE and KDE apps. It’s how you get a good system. Mixing and matching always results in a crap experience if you care about consistency. No way around it.
Give it a try then see how it is. You seem to talk without trying things. What do you mean "fake consistency"? The apps look and behave similarly. You change the font, it changes for them all. Theme? All! Icons? All, except some that force their own icon pack, which is fine.
I use TROMjaro daily, and probably hundreds others. And I love it. It is very consistent. Are you ignoring the fact that I tested thousands of apps and we have an app library where I post screenshots of these apps?
Maybe you should not discuss these things if you do not want to listen to others who have done a lot of testing and have a custom distro that tries to be as consistent as possible.
Like it or not, no one will use Gnome only with Gnome apps, or KDE only with KDE apps. This fantasy world does not exist.
there literally is not a universal API people can just plug into in order to make what you are wanting possible, and i doubt it will ever be made because different application frameworks do different things making it impossible to unify them.
Then there should be such an approach. What bothers me is that some people do not seem this fragmentation as important. From a usability perspective is very bad.
So you are saying the appimage, flatpak, or the repo for Thunderbird is not meant for Linux? That was a very bad example. I did not install the exe Thunderbird you know....
No, it is like a website would enforce how my browser should look. Beyond me how you guys are missing this point. I am talking about letting the system draw the window decoration as a most important step. The rest is up to the user to theme the app, granted the app does not enforce their own core theme as I think Libadwaita does.
window decorations are a part of the application, and an application can elect to have the window manager not draw them if it makes sense for it to do so
and some window managers can actually force window decorations onto an app that requests to not have them drawn (see i3wm)
A walled garden is when the Gnome apps refuse to let the user control how these apps are themed or managed inside the OS (window decoration wise). I want to control these apps, at least in that regard.
@dark But how can you run an app that use a design language so alien to the OS that any attemp to theme it will nuke it, as the "best" example I can think of right now, Vivaldi?
Sure there are some apps that enforce an own theme for good reasons. So be it. But if you practice that with most apps, or what Gnome is doing with their apps, it becomes a mess overall since the system cannot theme them at all. If you have a few rare apps like Vivaldi then fine, we can't have a perfect world, but when Gnome (the most popular DE) enforces such rules to not allow for the system to decorate their windows, that's problematic.
I’d also argue theming and custom weird scripts and WMs are less and less supported, not because developers don’t care about usability, but because they, in fact, DO.
Supporting everything and anything is the best way to have a mess that performs badly, and has a terrible UX. Focusing on one toolkit, one theme, one desktop is how you make good apps. libadwaita made GNOME the best app ecosystem on Linux, hands down. You’re not making Linux apps, you’re making GNOME apps.
Weird scripts are because Gnome and the like stopped working for the Linux ecosystem and focused on Gnome only, making it more simplistic and yet still not consistent. Many GTK apps do not support libadwaita. So even if you use Gnome you'll have a bad experience if you install more than 20 apps.
If you think a fix is to strip away most customization and make 1 theme and enforce it, then it is like removing workspaces, extensions, plugins, and other options and features from a DE and call it a success because now it is more stable.
Supporting everything and anything is the best way to have a mess that performs badly, and has a terrible UX.
Not making it easy to export the menus of an app is terrible UX. Not letting the system draw the window around you app, is another terrible decision. The theming you could argue that it can create inconsistencies, although if elements are well defined in QT or GTK then themes can be properly created.
And you still can run any Linux app if you need to, and if properly designed , they will not blend with the rest of the system but will still have their own design language.
If properly designed they should allow for the system to do the window decorations at least. Hopefully they also do not enforce their own theme unless the user wants that.
@Tio @Nick @ The Linux Experiment maybe you'd understand Tio's points if we put it in a different context, this is similar analogy I made up about USB ports and laptops:
Person 1: My laptop company stopped making laptops with USB ports, now I can't connect my mic or webcam or mouse or portable hard disks or anything!
Person 2: Most (nontechnical) people don't use USB ports anymore, they can now use Bluetooth or wifi to connect most of the devices that they need.
Person 1: But I have some devices that requires a USB connection and they're not working.
Person 2: If you use complicated devices like that then you're on your own, you can't expect the manufacturer of your laptop to make their laptop work on your specific setup - its not their responsibility.
Person 1: They don't have to make sure things work perfectly on my end, but
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@Tio @Nick @ The Linux Experiment maybe you'd understand Tio's points if we put it in a different context, this is similar analogy I made up about USB ports and laptops:
Person 1: My laptop company stopped making laptops with USB ports, now I can't connect my mic or webcam or mouse or portable hard disks or anything!
Person 2: Most (nontechnical) people don't use USB ports anymore, they can now use Bluetooth or wifi to connect most of the devices that they need.
Person 1: But I have some devices that requires a USB connection and they're not working.
Person 2: If you use complicated devices like that then you're on your own, you can't expect the manufacturer of your laptop to make their laptop work on your specific setup - its not their responsibility.
Person 1: They don't have to make sure things work perfectly on my end, but they should at least provide me with an optional USB port that I can use, it isn't so hard because they used to provide those before.
Person 2: They used to provide USB ports before but a lot of the USB devices people connected their laptop to didn't work as they should, so people started flooding the manufacturer's support forum asking why their laptops are not working when it was actually a problem with the specific USB device that they used and has nothing to do with the laptop itself 🤷
Person 1: Really?! I feel like if someone bought a USB device and it didn't work then they're more likely to blame that device first instead of thinking its a problem with the laptop itself 🤔
Person 2: Actually this happened because of some specialized stores that call themselves "distros" who sold out these laptops along with some USB accessories on a combo offer package - the thing is, they didn't properly test out all of the USB accessories before selling, so some of them just didn't work on the laptop they were sold with. The normal people who bought these distro-packages didn't knew about all these technical details so they expected the accessories they got to work well with the laptop, and when they found out that it didn't they started complaining to the laptop manufacturer. A lot of laptop brands got a bad rep because of this whole distro-package thing, so now they stopped making USB ports altogether to prevent these distro-shops from selling USB accessories on a combo-offer.
Person 1: Wow that's fucked up, I also own a distro-shop myself but I properly test all of my accessories and make sure they work well before selling them as a distro-package. Nowadays its getting hard for me because of these manufacturers who don't provide the USB port at all, before that I was able to somehow make all the accessories work on the laptop but now I have no option. Honestly, why do some of these USB accessories break in the first place? Can't they just make ones that work well?!
Person 2: A lot of USB accessories break because there's no common standard or an "API" as they call it, which dictates how USB ports and accessories talk to each other. So without such a standard there's no way to make sure your accessories work well on all laptops, so some of them are incompatible with certain laptops.
Person 1: Wow, then why are we not making an API or a common standard that works for all? That should solve all of the issues right?! Removing USB ports altogether just because some accessories were incompatible seems like backward thinking to me.
Person 2: You're probably right, creating an API would've been the best case scenario. But unfortunately its less likely to happen, laptop manufacturers are fed up with hearing these complaints from people so they'll probably stick with their decision to remove USB ports altogether, especially considering the whole distro-package situation and the mess it created - it hurt their brand image.
Person 1: TBH I prefer having a USB port, or at least an option to have that. Some accessories might be incompatible but most of them worked fine for me and I'd hate to lose all that.
Person 2: I don't think most normal people would be affected because like I said before they use bluetooth and wifi accessories now. Plus I've heard that the fruit company is making something called mac-laptop where they use a special type of USB port where only their official accessories work, so as long as you stick with the fruit ecosystem and only use their accessories you should be fine.
Person 1: This will hurt people who don't want to be on the fruit ecosystem, I still think its a bad idea to remove regular USB ports and replace it with a limited version of the same where only a few official fruit-accessories work. Plus there are some accessories that require a USB port to function, so normal users can't use them through Bluetooth or wifi like you assumed.
I would say perhaps another good analogy is Apple's approach where they make their own headphones, and mouse, and hardware and only support that. And then they say to the rest: of course other devices that you wanna connect to ours may not work properly, you should buy our Apple products only! And them not providing any support for the driver side of things, even making it difficult for others to make drivers for their preferred webcam, or mouse, and such.
Now of course in reality no one will only stick to Apple's products. This is an unreasonable request and approach.
In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.
And thus, the same way that people will connect non-apple devices to apple computers and many will create drivers for these, and yes some may not work as well as apple's ones, the same way people are going to use gnome apps on different distros and try to find a fix for the window decorations, theming and such.
It is
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Maybe the analogy can be a bit too long.
I would say perhaps another good analogy is Apple's approach where they make their own headphones, and mouse, and hardware and only support that. And then they say to the rest: of course other devices that you wanna connect to ours may not work properly, you should buy our Apple products only! And them not providing any support for the driver side of things, even making it difficult for others to make drivers for their preferred webcam, or mouse, and such.
Now of course in reality no one will only stick to Apple's products. This is an unreasonable request and approach.
In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.
And thus, the same way that people will connect non-apple devices to apple computers and many will create drivers for these, and yes some may not work as well as apple's ones, the same way people are going to use gnome apps on different distros and try to find a fix for the window decorations, theming and such.
It is a question of how much of an Apple are you. This is from the developer of the well known nocsd package:
Since Gtk+ 3.10, its developers added a so-called header bar or custom title bar. With this and the client-side decoration, the original title bar and window border provided by the window manager are disabled by Gtk+. This makes all Gtk+ 3 programs look alike. Even worse, this may break some window manager or compositors.
Unfortunately, the Gtk+ developers decided to be against the existing standards and provide "no option" to turn it off.
Based on his words Gnome made it difficult, if not impossible, to let the system do the window decorations. From this perspective only, Gnome is Apple. if they could at least allow the CSD to be easily disabled....
> In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.
The main reason why I (and many others) use Arch or an Arch based distro is because of the AUR and its app availability, I can't imagine being restricted to ONLY use gnome apps, or even KDE apps for that matter.
I also wanna respond to something else Nick said here before:
> It’s always the same argument: power users feel they’re losing access to customization, the rest of the world applauds more coherency and better design.
This assumption that power users are the only people affected by these changes is completely false, in fact in a lot of cases it's the contrary. Take the above video that Tio made for example, in it he's complaining about how he
> In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.
The main reason why I (and many others) use Arch or an Arch based distro is because of the AUR and its app availability, I can't imagine being restricted to ONLY use gnome apps, or even KDE apps for that matter.
I also wanna respond to something else Nick said here before:
> It’s always the same argument: power users feel they’re losing access to customization, the rest of the world applauds more coherency and better design.
This assumption that power users are the only people affected by these changes is completely false, in fact in a lot of cases it's the contrary. Take the above video that Tio made for example, in it he's complaining about how he can't right click on his title bar to get those window options - this is because he's a normie Linux user who mainly uses GUI apps on his XFCE desktop environment, on the contrary I'm someone who you might refer to as a power user because I mostly use terminal programs and a window manager like DWM - so for me, and many other window manager users, we don't even have a title bar on top of our windows to click on! Lol 😂 This is because power users don't like to use mouse very much so they use keyboard shortcuts to do those things, similarly when we use terminal programs most of the time we're not affected by these problems that Tio is talking about - at least not as much as it affects regular users. I don't know what made you think Tio is a power user, he hates using the terminal man, lol 😆 You could say that Tio has more technical knowledge than the average person and I'd agree, but he also makes his parents, wife, and sister use his Linux distro to understand how nontechnical people experience these things - which is why he has a very good understanding of UX. The fact of the matter is that lack of customizability impacts regular everyday users the most, their eyes are gonna suffer if an app doesn't respect their dark mode, they're the ones that are gonna struggle reading if an app doesn't respect their font size, I've also heard of some font styles made for dyslexic people to read better - so if an app doesn't support these customizations then its bad UX and accessibility for normal people, power users are also affected by these accessibility issues but they're more likely to find a fix for it if there exists one.
On Mac you know that clicking the red dot on a window it closes it and that that there are 3 window buttons. The middle one (I think it is yellow) minimizes a window and the green (last) minimizes it. On Windows is different being represented with X, a square, and _ . If the system chooses to use one particular way for the window buttons and their position, then imagine when the Gnome apps do not respect that and put their own window buttons in whatever side of the app they desire. This is a bad thing for all "normal" users.
Shadows or borders for windows are also a good way of knowing what window is on top of other. If the system does a good job at that, but then the Gnome apps have no borders or no shadows, it beaks that consistency. Not to mention losing features like I explained in the video. You know there are people like Roko who do not use a mouse much, so they do not need a titlebar, but if Gnome enforces one with their own window buttons, it makes things more complicated and inconsistent.
Also accent colors are a quick hint of what you can click or what it is
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On Mac you know that clicking the red dot on a window it closes it and that that there are 3 window buttons. The middle one (I think it is yellow) minimizes a window and the green (last) minimizes it. On Windows is different being represented with X, a square, and _ . If the system chooses to use one particular way for the window buttons and their position, then imagine when the Gnome apps do not respect that and put their own window buttons in whatever side of the app they desire. This is a bad thing for all "normal" users.
Shadows or borders for windows are also a good way of knowing what window is on top of other. If the system does a good job at that, but then the Gnome apps have no borders or no shadows, it beaks that consistency. Not to mention losing features like I explained in the video. You know there are people like Roko who do not use a mouse much, so they do not need a titlebar, but if Gnome enforces one with their own window buttons, it makes things more complicated and inconsistent.
Also accent colors are a quick hint of what you can click or what it is active. If you have different apps with different accent colors it can be very confusing.
But anyway, there should be 0 debates when it comes to the window decoration. This needs to be done by the system itself, else you lose all functionalities of the system and create a complete circus. As for the theming you can have some arguments against theming apps, but fact is people will theme their system. They do so o Mac, Windows, Android and Linux. So better we have a way for them to do it properly rather than being naive and expecting for them to only use the Gnome apps on the Gnome desktop. That's hilarious :).
@Tio @Nick @ The Linux Experiment Personally I don't actually do much customization or theming on my system, I just go with the default setup of the distro I use without changing much. I also don't care much if an app doesn't look exactly the same as my other apps, as long as they respect these 2 things - dark mode and font size, like I explained before these are accessibility related features that I consider essential. If I strain my eyes by looking at the screen too much then it'll trigger a headache for me, it can get so bad that sometimes I'll have to put an ice pack on top of my head & eyes - so this is almost like a health problem that I could avoid to some extend by using dark theme and bigger font sizes (and limiting screen time ofc, there is an app called safeeyes on linux that can help). So yeah, that's my personal situation, I'm telling this to let you know that not all of us are customization freaks who changes everything on their system, and still we appreciate things like customizability & consistent theming for other reasons that might be personal to us.
I am working on a TROMjaro visual revamp. The focus: usability and being clean and intuitive. We will work on a welcome screen too and hopefully integrate a bunch of cool stuff into it. I want TROMjaro to be very easy to use and for that we need more improvements...
We only need 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month. Equal contributions by a handful of people, to distribute the financial support in order to make it sustainable and fair for all.
We will also talk a bit about the upcoming ZDay in Prague where we will present our project, plus a few more things.
WILL START AT: 21:00 Madrid Time, 28th of July. In this cast we will discuss about our new approach to support our project forever. See https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ We only need 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month.
In this cast we will discuss about our new approach to support our project forever. See tromsite.com/donate/
We only need 200 people to donate 5 Euros a month. Equal contributions by a handful of people, to distribute the financial support in order to make it sustainable and fair for all.
We will also talk a bit about the upcoming ZDay in Prague where we will present our project, plus a few more things.
For one, I see no emails what-so-ever. I have no idea how to fix this.... It works to send and receive emails tho....so that's a total mystery. I also have no clue where to report this to Thunderbird...
I don't understand the big deal with the new UI. My Thunderbird looked almost identical. Simple, clean. Unified folders and all that. Now it is worse because the app does not respect me and my system.
I have a different theme/accent color for my system....but Thunderbird downgrades its release to not work well with the system it seems.
Also, a massive topbar with a huge search bar that makes it more difficult to grab the window and move it around. Plus why 2 search
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The new Thunderbird is bad, at first sight.
For one, I see no emails what-so-ever. I have no idea how to fix this.... It works to send and receive emails tho....so that's a total mystery. I also have no clue where to report this to Thunderbird...
I don't understand the big deal with the new UI. My Thunderbird looked almost identical. Simple, clean. Unified folders and all that. Now it is worse because the app does not respect me and my system.
I have a different theme/accent color for my system....but Thunderbird downgrades its release to not work well with the system it seems.
Also, a massive topbar with a huge search bar that makes it more difficult to grab the window and move it around. Plus why 2 search bars? Isn't the "filter messages" bar enough?
And of course the annoying GTK4 topbar that won't let me use the XFCE features like rolling up the window or maximize it to the topbar to save space...
Idk what's up with the people who think that improvements always should bring less features, less customization options, less compatibility with the system.... If anything Thunderbird should have made it more compatible with the system, like allow me to use the HUD and search through the menu like I can with 90% of all apps.
Overall a bad experience and now I have to get my emails back somehow.....
I start to hate more and more the Gnomes. They are the apple-fan-boys of Linux, thinking of how great it is to make everything more simplistic and unusable and geared to only the Gnome world. Linux is going to lose more of its uniqueness, defaulting to 1 theme and 5 accent colors, and 1 desktop environment, Gnome. And the rest will still be around, but small, and butchered by the GTK4 and such decisions, making the Gnome apps look like weeds in a field, not matching anything on other desktops and not working well on other desktops.
The 2 search bars have been a thing for years long before this update. The difference being that the filter bar only searches the current folder (and only headers by default), while the main one searches everything.
Having them both enabled by default is bad. Should have thought of a different design. Also, if I didn't have the "main search bar" before the update, prob Thunderbird should not have enabled it. Especially on the giant GTK4 topbar.
I managed to bring back my email accounts and settings by copying some folders files from the old config account....very very bad situation. Anyway, on a more positive side some things do look more polished. But not respecting the system's theme, and fonts, and window decorations is terrible.
Mind you this approach may take some time to achieve, but we have to in order to keep TROM alive and sustainable. Only 5 Euros donations are accepted, so that we can spread the load on 200 people in order to make sure that we get this support for a long long time, and that we do not put any pressure on any individual to donate a large amount of money.
Please, consider donating 2 cups of coffee to TROM and the so many projects we have.
The idea of contained apps on Linux is for sure the future. It is a thousand times better than what we normally have now. And yes these contained apps can be huge, tho some libraries can be shared....however knowing that if you install this X app as flatpak (contained) will guarantee to work, is pure bliss. It is so much easier. Click install, done. Unlike via repos where you also have to install a ton of other dependencies and at times these dependencies conflict with other packages....it can be hell...
BUT
These contained apps must be respectful to you and your system. They MUST respect the theme, font style, and window decorations. Else they are 100% cunts. And we can't have that! And right now flatpaks (the perhaps future of apps packaging on Linux) do not play well with this.
As soon as flatpaks respect the user and their choices, I will give them a serious try. And maybe in the future TROMjaro can rely on flatpaks. But right now despite them being contained and functional, I cannot use a thousand themes and styles and window decorations on a single system.
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The idea of contained apps on Linux is for sure the future. It is a thousand times better than what we normally have now. And yes these contained apps can be huge, tho some libraries can be shared....however knowing that if you install this X app as flatpak (contained) will guarantee to work, is pure bliss. It is so much easier. Click install, done. Unlike via repos where you also have to install a ton of other dependencies and at times these dependencies conflict with other packages....it can be hell...
BUT
These contained apps must be respectful to you and your system. They MUST respect the theme, font style, and window decorations. Else they are 100% cunts. And we can't have that! And right now flatpaks (the perhaps future of apps packaging on Linux) do not play well with this.
As soon as flatpaks respect the user and their choices, I will give them a serious try. And maybe in the future TROMjaro can rely on flatpaks. But right now despite them being contained and functional, I cannot use a thousand themes and styles and window decorations on a single system.
As of today I am a certified diver :) . Open Water Diver. The first level, but still, awesome. And actually I got the course for free kinda, which is great. Very nice people. Friends of Sasha :). I am very happy that I can go dive more now. And I will have to check for my stomach health issues more but as long as I control my diet all should be fine.
To be underwater and breath, is such an amazing feeling. The closest you get to flying. And last dive we saw some very cool sponges, and other creatures. Next time I'll try to get the gopro and record some stuff. Humans should do these things for free, so they understand more about our place on this planet.
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