Just take a look at most of the single window screenshots (not the one above) in this article and notice how big the gap is between them and their captions. This new version keeps an even larger margin to accomodate shadow effects.

So unless you know C programming language and want to play this cat and mouse game with each new release of libadwaita, theming in GNOME is officially over.īelieve it or not, this screenshot was taken from a desktop system As expected, their styles do not match.īut what about real theming? At this point libadwaita only allows users to change between light and dark modes. Because of that, users now have two places to set dark/light modes: one in Settings (driven by libadwaita) and the other in Tweaks (driven by libhandy). GNOME could also have embedded in libadwaita both dark and light modes for legacy applications, but they decided not to. GNOME 42, on the other hand, decided to implement freedesktop color scheme standard to deal with dark and light modes, and it is all embedded in this in-house new library called libadwaita. But at least with a bit of digging the user could find a straightforward application to change themes, which were made using CSS, meaning any designer would be able to create/modify them. Until GNOME 41, if the user wanted to change the theme they would not find a way unless using Tweaks, this application that GNOME would love to get rid of and some distros do not even ship with, like Fedora and Ubuntu.

As a result, these apps have better performance, a new modern UI style, and new user interface elements. GTK 4 and libadwaita provide next generation capabilities for GNOME applications, and many GNOME apps have started to use these components for GNOME 42. Instead of fixing the long list of issues found in previous GNOME versions, the companies behind GNOME decided to add more, creating inconsistencies, including dubious libraries, useless new applications, removing features and even ignoring well-established UI conventions. GNOME 42 is just another example of that. The majority of popular applications and services are constantly being updated even if these changes are irrelevant or, in many cases, making the products worse. Although we can question this logic, we can all agree it has dominated the market. It seems the tech industry has been trying to make us believe that we need constant novelty otherwise we will be left behind.

Same gnome game for windows