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Reminder: System76 is not to be trusted
(blogs.gnome.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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Tbh I don't really like what Gnome has done to theming. Of course that doesn't excuse system76's communication approach.
I feel like Linux desktop UI has peeked with Gnome 2.
As the blogpost states, GNOME didn't do anything to theming that couldn't be received gracefully by downstreams like Ubuntu.
It really is just a case of people leaning on GNOME for so long that they feel that they're entitled to the decision-making process.
I'm not really sure that's true. After Gnome 2 got deprecated we saw a lot of new desktop environments appearing, with their own sets of default apps. Canonical famously tried it's luck with Unity too.
Pop OS building their own DE from the ground up isn't people leaning on Gnome too much. It's the second release in a row that makes Gnome less satasfactory for distro integration. We saw similar developments when Gnome 3 came out.
Of course GTK apps are still a pain, and even more of a pain with GTK 4, to integrate. I don't really have the feeling that the Gnome guy is speaking for application developers as much as he claims to. A lot of app developers stuck to GTK 2 to the bitter end and younger devs don't even consider native widget systems any more, it's all electron apps, if there is a desktop app at all. I think that's a missed chance (of course also not centrally styleable).