GTK4 accepts just as many aternative styles as before, you are mixing up GTK4 and members of the GNOME team. The anti-theme drama happened when some GNOME devs (and a bunch of other libadwaita users) made an open letter that asked that people do not distribute their apps with a preinstalled theme. The first versions of the letter were lunatic, sure, but it is just a request. ZorinOS ignores that request and they’re doing just fine.
If you put a theme in ~/.config/gtk4/gtk.css, most apps will load it. Note that libadwaita, the widget kit used by GNOME and a lot of other GTK4 apps (but not all of them), no longer considers that changing a CSS class is a breaking change. For this reason, your theme may break when libadwaita updates. Which is a reasonable thing.
Also you need to restart the app for the theme to apply, which wasn’t the case before.
Sorry for the rant, this one annoys me because all the specialized medias fell for it. It’s a case of a very easily demonstrable fact that gets drowned in stupid Twitter/Phoronix drama.
And now my computer is all pink and yellow again because I made a theme to reassure myself that I wasn’t insane. I do that every few years to make sure I’m not delusional and everyone online is wrong but me.
Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.
Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.
GTK4 accepts just as many aternative styles as before, you are mixing up GTK4 and members of the GNOME team. The anti-theme drama happened when some GNOME devs (and a bunch of other libadwaita users) made an open letter that asked that people do not distribute their apps with a preinstalled theme. The first versions of the letter were lunatic, sure, but it is just a request. ZorinOS ignores that request and they’re doing just fine.
If you put a theme in
~/.config/gtk4/gtk.css, most apps will load it. Note that libadwaita, the widget kit used by GNOME and a lot of other GTK4 apps (but not all of them), no longer considers that changing a CSS class is a breaking change. For this reason, your theme may break when libadwaita updates. Which is a reasonable thing.Also you need to restart the app for the theme to apply, which wasn’t the case before.
Sorry for the rant, this one annoys me because all the specialized medias fell for it. It’s a case of a very easily demonstrable fact that gets drowned in stupid Twitter/Phoronix drama.
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1598493 this a well known theme for libadwaita. I don’t know if there are others, I would guess so.
https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest and here are a ton of themes for non-libadwaita GTK4 apps. They might break libadwaita apps, I haven’t tried any.
And now my computer is all pink and yellow again because I made a theme to reassure myself that I wasn’t insane. I do that every few years to make sure I’m not delusional and everyone online is wrong but me.
thank you! every time someone says that I’m like: but i have a theme installed right now 😿
Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.
Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.
Themes cannot cleanly move widgets out of their parents, I would assume it’s how the apps are designed