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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • The thing is, Firefox has an extension API. It’s a proper thing that they maintain, and make guarantees about. GNOME intentionally doesn’t have an API, because if they did, the things extensions could do would be limited to what those APIs expose. Instead, they let extensions do whatever they want, patching the code of the shell directly. This comes at the cost of extensions needing to be updated for new shell versions, but it lets extensions be extremely powerful.

    In fact, Firefox had this issue a few years back. They switched from a GNOME like system to the WebExtensions API, which is more limited and broke basically every extension if they didn’t update. There are still some add-ons that can’t be replicated because they need functionality the API doesn’t expose.








  • TheL3mur@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlWhy can't flatpaks just work
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    1 year ago
    1. That site isn’t RedHat/GNOME. From the bottom of the letter:

    Note: Even though some of us are Foundation members or work on GNOME, these are our personal views as individuals, and not those of the GNOME Project, the GNOME Foundation, or our employers.

    1. They aren’t against user theming. Again, from the site:

    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 unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

    They’re against distributions shipping custom stylesheets by default. Which makes sense! If a user has a stock installation, and an app looks broken, they aren’t going to assume the distribution messed it up. They might not even know that the distribution changed the theme. It can also cause confusion for users when their app doesn’t look like the screenshots from the developer. These cause issues for app developers.

    That’s it. That’s all the letter is saying. It’s not a crusade against you theming, it’s asking for theming not to be done by distributions.

    (P.S. I don’t intend for this to be aggressive. Just wanted to explain a bit more, because the name does sound… not great.)