And let's not forget that you need theming support so your OS can accommodate people with different vision requirements. So you can have a low-contrast theme, and a high-contrast theme, and a red-green colour-blind theme and so on. And let's not forget people who need a large text theme. Remember 15 years ago when we were so proud of GTK for being able to dynamically adjust for all these things (as opposed to Windows's half-assed support)? Remember when user experience was more important than designer vision? Remember when we all solved the problem of separating the data from the presentation? Remember when GUIs were written with a particular look in mind, but could adjust for various themes?
There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.
Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.
> There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.
The Web. It comes from the Web.
Web development has this bullshit school of UI/UX design that prioritizes branding, dark patterns, and treating users like toddlers, at the expense of making the software functional and usable. Since we all get industry news from the Web, the Web patterns are the most well-known, and they pollute desktop software development too (doubly so when desktop software is nowadays built as webpages bundled to a browser runtime).
It's not that the Web school of UX is completely wrong; the problem is that it mixes ergonomics with a whole range of tricks designed to make the software more popular and more sellable in spite of the utility reduction they cause, and then sells the whole bundle as "scientifically validated" and "data driven".
Yeah. People say one of the problems with free software is that its UX is designed by programmers rather than UX designers. Which makes sense, because UX designers should be able to design a good UX.
There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.
Edit: And if you really need your app to not be themed, just force Adwaita on startup. This doesn't seem like it should need a complete upheaval in how we use GUIs.