I love libadwaita/GTK4. All my apps are consistent, look and work in the same way, they all look gorgeous, and there’s extreme attention to detail and adherence to good, well-studied UI paradigms.
Libadwaita has went a long way in making my system feel like one cohesive ecosystem, rather than a smattering of inconsistent, wildly different apps.
Libadwaita and GTK4 is amazing and the developers deserve a lot of praise.
But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.
But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.
Not when you are forced into it because it’s made a dependency of something you use.
Then use an alternative, if you really hate anything even remotely connected to it on your system and are seeking the ideological purity of having zero related dependencies.
You’re not entitled to have the software that’s provided to you for free be exactly how you like it.
But if your view is popular enough, there will surely be alternatives or altered forks.
Oh no I do when it comes to that. The problem’s (usually) not there.
The problem mostly lies with distro packagers. They often ignore the “this dependency is optional” part and make the dependency mandatory. Back in the day Fedora was terrible at packaging new stuff (trying to remove PulseAudio would also try to remove Libreoffice, for example), nowadays it seems it’s Debian’s turn at the horribad packaging wheel. So in order to “use an alternative”, which would actually be the exact same software I’m already using except correctly compiled and packaged, I’d have to jump distros.
One notorious example is NetworkManager, which in Debian requires systemd for some weird-ass reason even tho you can run a correct Debian system without systemd. The Antix people compile it correctly, with systemd as optional / shim’d, but that means having to add Antix’s repo to Debian to use NetworkManager in Debian.
