r/gnome•
nlkl

What is the endgame for Libadwaita?

Question

As a short disclaimer, I should mention that I am both pro-Libadwaita and am in general rather tolerant to inconsistency in application theming. The below is therefore not meant as a critique or even to question the goals behind Libadwaita as such, but merely to clarify some unknowns I have been unable to find answers to elsewhere.

We are currently in a transitional phase towards Libadwaita, and several GNOME applications are yet to be fully ported to Libadwaita or even GTK4. As such, there is as expected some inconsistency between the applications that have been ported and those that haven't yet.

Additionally, the clear stance from GNOME is that there is no intention to provide an official Libadwaita theme for GTK3 applications, for a lot of (in my opinion valid) reasons. Community projects such as adw3-gtk aim to address that gap.

Now, what I am curious about is what the vision is for the "endstate". Say, at some point the bulk of applications might have been ported to GTK4, and the ones specifically targeting GNOME will be using Libadwaita.

Is the expectation that the inconsistency between plain GTK4 apps and Libadwaita apps will remain indefinitely (or left to community themes to fix)? What about things like Electron apps with a "native" window border - is the expectation that those borders will keep the old Adwaita style, that there will be specific Libdadwaita builds (or something more dynamic), or are there any other plans for styling such window borders?

Depending on the answers to the above, wouldn't it _almost_ have made sense to make Libadwaita default in GTK4, with an option for app developers to opt in to theming if they want their apps themeable? It seems no one really wants to use the legacy Adwaita theme anyway, so wouldn't Libadwaita be just as good a default for plain GTK4 apps, say Mint's XApps, if they apply custom theming anyway?

Posted Aug 21, 2022, 7:33 PM UTC

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