Modern XMPP project discussion - 2026-07-07

I really wish there was a neutral GTK based Jabber client.

If wishes were horses

what non-neutral about Dino and Gajim?

What is neutral?

non acid nor alkaline ig

GTK neutral, not pH neutral :D

Neutral GTK might mean between 0 and the latest version of GTK. So GTK2.

Non political GTK? Not enforcing any UI opinions on you, by not having a UI. Only works via CLI pipes and FIFOs, but uses gobject unnecessarily

KDE app running under Gtk with special stylesheet to blend in

Dino is as plain of a GTK app as it can get 🙄

not an xmpp client, but i think gthumb does a good job of feeling native on kde despite being gtk4

also dino feels very gtk4, but its one of the few apps i feel like actually make good use of the libadwaita styling, if only it had features

(and ime dinox is completely broken slop)

> What is neutral? I think we should clarify that first

I guess I meant more like uhhh Uses the most basic GTK buttons that work on every GTK desktop, and not newer stuff that only works or looks unbroken on Gnome while appearing broken on every other desktop.

If it uses libadwaita, it should look exactly the same everywhere

Every once in a while I'll install a GTK based app but then it's completely or partially broken on every desktop except Gnome. And of course none of them ever work with your theme you just put a couple hours of love into. But then they default to this default gnome thing which looks like bright light blue text or light gray text on a blinding white background, looking like a medical web page.

I don't know everything about it, I just see the results when I go to install stuff. I've thought it was the "libadwaita" that seems to bring in all the breakages and blinding white theme. GTK is kinda neutral and works on whatever.

(in my experience as an end user.)

What you call breaking is the design selected by the developer. libadwaita is what prevents third parties (who put a couple of hours of love into it) to break the apps by using custom themes.

Wat

Check https://stopthemingmy.app/ about how themes have historically broken apps

Oh god what

> assuming every app works with every stylesheet is a bad default.

These guys want people to stop themeing their computers?

Are you also complaining that websites don't make it easy to theme them?

> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

Websites are easy to theme and they aren't inside my computer.

GTK apps are also easy to theme, if you don't mind breaking everything

This is bizarre. People have been themeing their computers since forever. Even on closed source systems.

Yes, and it breaks things since forever.

https://http.xmpp.is:5281/file_share/019f3d84-2d03-7cad-9766-90fd9829566f/XhGdoZqDQKqUcxAYB-J8QA.jpg

The gnome dev kneels before windows since 95.

You can change colors in GNOME as well

BEHOLD HOT DOG STAND THEME

That's not the same as changing the CSS.

This is just a bizarre thing to make a website about. I feel like those guys came into open source software on accident somehow. They'd be less unhappy working for Apple.

CSS has defined color variables. If you change those, most things are going to work (most, because you will still occasionally see things still using the "original" colors, because they were not prepared for it)

They literally have examples on that website how the Ubuntu default theme broke the GNOME file explorer

As a developer I can tell you it really sucks when people theme your app and then blame you if that theme breaks things. In Dino we have code to discover if the user uses a dark theme that doesn't say it's a dark theme.

I know someone could write a theme wrong and break something but that's on them. But This is just so weird. If I write a program why on earth would I want to spend time telling my users they shouldn't use themes they like or want? It's not my computer. If they write their own theme badly and it breaks a button in my app then oh well. I've been using gnu-linux systems since like 2002 and the different GTK desktops always had apps look the same between them. I could install a "autumn themed" GTK theme on MATE like I could LXDE or XFCE and install the same GTK calculator app on each system, and the autumn GTK theme would make the GTK calculator app look the same on each desktop. It's already worked for 20.years.

grey, users often come to complain that a particular program is broken in some way, recently it was someone not finding buttons, or not having the entry box to type in a message, stuff like that, which was caused by their theme.

So it’s a lot of work for people doing support, who have to figure out the user broke their program on their own, because the users will never assume their theme is what broke the program.

I guess there's that.

grey: the more effort one puts into making the apps look good, the easier it is for custom themes to break things. In Dino we need to know if the user has a dark theme, because we automatically generate those avatars with a background color. The background color has a different brightness on dark theme to get the contrast right. Now there is a standard way to tell apps that they should use a dark theme, but also, you could just use a custom theme that effectively is a dark theme without using that standard freedesktop property, so apps would detect it as a light theme, when in fact it is light text on dark background (what people would usually consider a dark theme). This happened so often and caused users to complain that we needed to add custom code to Dino that looks at the background color of your current theme and if that's dark we consider it a dark theme.

So say if I want to make a bunch of my own GTK themes that also account for all the new non standard GTK stuff that works on every desktop, what is someone supposed to target?

Well, GTK doesn't have themes, it has stylesheets. Every new version of an app could change the stylesheet in an incompatible way. Treat custom stylesheets for apps the same way as custom stylesheets for websites.

grey, what do you mean by non-standard GTK stuff?

Every GTK program I know of has custom widgets, because that’s the way you extend the features of your program.

If you just want to change to dark theme or change the accent color from blue to orange, use the intended functionality for that and most apps will honor it.

Stuff like Dino’s avatar widget.

Every user interface is a composition of widgets and thereby somewhat a custom widget. Themes that change e.g. border styles or padding sizes potentially interfere with how the widget composition works and may break things.

Oh man I just remembered I recently started to have this issue with Firefox. I've had a soft green GTK theme on my Mint box for years and a recent update to Firefox now (seems to me) uses specific Gnome only stuff instead of standard GTK stuff. So it defaulted back to that awful blinding white medical office looking theme and I get flashbanged every time the download window pops up.

grey, there is nothing GNOME-only that I know of, btw.

Yeah I'm not sure I'm using the right word. I can only describe what I see.

Firefox is also still using GTK 3 for some things on Linux, but has been a XUL+HTML application from the very beginning.

grey, if your issue is with the default theme being light, you could set it to dark in the XDG desktop portal you use.

That way every application will default to dark.

That’s what both GTK and libadwaita use.

I see.

I'll look into that.

I'm just having a hard time describing it. I just know normal theme choosing activities are not as good as they once were because it used to be for like 20 years you could write one GTK theme and another guy would write a GTK program and both would look the same and work the same across XFCE, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon, Gnome, and a bunch of other desktops I'm not remembering. Now new apps seem to target just the Gnome desktop and are broken on install on all other desktops, so I thought "uh oh that's new" and also old apps get an update that says "we're including libadwaita/gnome features!" And I think "cool what's that?" And I update it and it breaks and I'm like "oh no it's that thing again."

In addition to Firefox the jabber app called Psi also recently did this.

Then I ask about it on the Internet and people say "Idk how to fix it, that happened on my box too."

Psi uses Qt, not GTK.

So I can't say what it is underneath the hood that is doing this, but I keep running into it more and more and seeing other people run into it more and more. Which is why I was originally wishing for a "neutral" GTK jabber app. Because I feel like Jabber + OMEMO + easy client apps are more and more important in these times.

> Psi uses Qt, not GTK. hunh. Weird. It worked with my green theme before latest update then gnome-medical-default afterwards.

grey, I think you should just configure your portal to set the preference as dark, that way most toolkits will just default to a dark variant of their theme and you won’t have to use a custom theme any longer.

But I like green.

In GNOME it’s indeed easy, there is a toggle in the top-right menu to pick the dark variant and it’ll do everything correctly.

Green is nice to look at.

In GNOME setting the accent colour to green is also easy, you go to the settings and pick green as your accent colour.

I will die on this hill, a green hill.

Lol

I don’t know about other desktop environments, but you might want to open issues against them to let them know you’d like it to be as easy as in GNOME.

https://uploads.outmo.de/upload/9e249deae4f7a4a49ab4f4dd1d217d5ae036e700/IP2c8SiiP5L7x5VmeBvvPNoPyDZGWpWXlVg30qe2/hilltodieon.jpg

I like the bears hill because it is green.

> As a developer I can tell you it really sucks when people theme your app and then blame you if that theme breaks things. In Dino we have code to discover if the user uses a dark theme that doesn't say it's a dark theme. Imagine hardcoding stuff for a specific theme instead of doing things properly