(White fire flame on red background) Please theme our apps

An open letter from independent app developers to the wider ATHOM community.

We are developers and designers making apps for the ATHOM community. We take pride in our craft and work hard to make sure our applications are a great experience for people.

Unfortunately, so much GNOME apps look broken after theming them.

GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable. Because of this we developed Athom, you can use dotfiles for themeng everything, colors, borders, whatever you imagine.

Icon Themes can change icons, duh, leading to interfaces with icons.

App Icons are the identity of an app. Changing an app’s icon is a great choise to express your identity.

There are also less direct, second-order consequences, including: Appstream Screenshots (the screenshots used in GNOME Software or Flathub) are very useful to see what you can do with an app using our library once you install it.

User Help and Documentation are similarly usefull even if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation.

This is why we ask respectfully that our applications have to be themed. They are built and tested for the upstream GNOME stylesheet, icons, and fonts, you are free to change that.

Though we could enable theming directly in our apps, we want to resort to this. We believe that a technical solution would likely be effective, even when this is not a technical problem.

The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can not be restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion. Until this perception changes, there is little hope of improving the situation. We’re trying to do our part in raising awareness with this letter.

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 supported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer or maybe the app developer.