Adding my support to Josh and Beatrice, agreed with the arguments presented and fully back the devs
decision to push forward in a new direction.
Its an exciting time to be part of the Solus community. Sadly I'm not a programming guru but you have my moral and if needed, financial support going forward. Go for it 😃

Lucien_Lachance
People there are getting really passionate in the comments aren't they?
And abusive, some really nasty comments targeted towards Ubuntu, System76 and Solus for having the cheek to express an opinion. And missing the point by focusing exclusively on the theming.

    The problem itself it is not theming... gnome devs are hard to work, a bit arrogant, and don't like different opinion, it doesn't look like a community project;
    And theming is too the problem... system76 has offered help with theming, as some others, and they insist in not working together, they want to send their libadwaita down our guts, liking or not, and worst, they want it to be implemented as the only way to experience an GTK+ app... take as example KDE, they never forced anyone to use breeze, it is their main appearance, but you can change that easily within their config app, gnome actually has hidden this possibility from us.
    Removing freedom of choice, is removing the essence of our community, the only choice is to move away, and wait.

    as I understand it, GTK themes were always sort of a hack (?) but from a user perspective they always worked well. all the complaints I've heard about themes seem to follow a pattern of "well, it makes it hard to do x" without any questioning of whether it made sense to do x in the first place.

    icon packs have wildly different ideas for their icons! our icon buttons in our GtkHeaderBars might not make sense!

    I could rant about my issues with headerbars, but basically, GtkMenuBar doesn't have this problem and I don't see a good reason to move away from it.

    users' themes will cause our custom styling to break!

    who thought it was a good idea to allow GTK programs to override colours in the first place? what benefit does this give? I've yet to see a good example.

    I always thought Adwaita was just a bit of a weird theme and headerbars a bit of a weird idea until I used a friend's recent Mac laptop and realised that Gnome is just trying to rip off MacOS. now it all makes sense and it's frankly pretty embarrassing. how about we just build something better than Mac or Windows instead of just copying?

    @JoshStrobl Looking ahead as Budgie leaves GTK behind, what mail client do you envision being best integrated with your philosophy and outlook?

      jppelt I can't speak for Josh, but I personally see no reason why we wouldn't stick with Thunderbird like we always have. It's GTK3 like Firefox and is unlikely to go to GTK4 any time soon. Even if it did, it's very unlikely Mozilla would choose to use libadwaita, which is the main sticking point with the other GTK applications in the Budgie Edition.

          I will say what I said already on Twitter. I use Solus because I think it's especial. We often find friends because we see ourselves in them. It's the same with the OS, I want to see myself in my system. It's a long journey and I congratulate the Solus team on this step.

          OK, This is BRILLIANT! I just started using Solus OS and absolutely love it. You can tell lots of care went into it's development! And I appreciate the move away from Gnome and GTK...more brilliance from the Solus Dev Team!

          DataDrake good. I use Firefox and Thunderbird and have for years...although...I am making a move to Brave

            Scotty-Trees , this says it all, "Gnome: "Extensions are bad! Themes are bad! Users choices are bad! Wait, where did everyone go?!""

            I guess the Gnome Devs haven't looked at the enormous amount of HACKS (extensions) that are needed in order to use it for most people.

              I love coming to the Solus forum and blogs because I always seem to learn something I didn't know before.

              I didn't realize adoption on RUST was picking up steam like this and it's great to see! The downside is now I'm going to actually have to look at more of it because looking into EFL, it's now piqued my curiosity.

              That's the rub with communities. They tend to get passionately emotionally involved in it. Sometimes it's difficult for people to take negative criticism as well. Really like how the blog was written.
              R/

              I re-read Josh's great post and suggest doing a separate toolkit creation project. Within the framework of this project, you can invite all interested parties such as system76 and others to cooperate. Further, if the initiative finds great support among the developers, I think it is worth contacting users with a request to support the project. Conduct a hackathon show with a lot of fundraising (you need to explain why a toolkit is very important and can predetermine the interest of commercial developers in linux). This will provide developers with a development tool and users with many new programs. Surely, it sounds utopian, but it seems to me quite realizable

              also I would like to ask about the druid and orbtk in solus

                George Druid uses GTK3 under Linux, which is a non-starter. orbtk was really only brought to my attention by Jeremy (System76 and Redox OS) after the release of the blog post, so that's something that may be an option for some down the road, however at the moment EFL is the most comprehensive solution.

                    JoshStrobl the last time I saw OrbTK it only had a screenshot of the calculator example and it didn't look very interesting. seems it's more fleshed-out than I expected- I may try porting one of my programs to this!

                      I know it is pretty early on but am curious how the transition will take place. Do you plan on having a separate repo or desktop package for building and testing? Will there be an opportunity for opencollective contributors to help by testing? I absolutely love the dedication you all have and cannot wait to be a part of this transition.

                        njakes The way I wanna go about it is having a "beta" branch + set of packages people can test out when it's ready, and I do intend on having testing images for folks (plus we'll need them internally, so win-win).

                        I want to take the same path with the Software Center too, where you can install the new Software Center as a "beta" to start testing whatever is there (for example, it might start before sol is even done so we can test the other plugins), but still have the old one around for normal eopkg operations. Then once bugs are worked out and sol is integrated, all we gotta do to roll it out completely is update the main solus-sc repo package.