Well because what this thread needs is an other opinion. I add mine. As just a User
I like rounded buttons, slightly rounded buttons. I would love to be able to download and install a control look that gave me such a thing.
I even like rounded windows, again slightly. This is my personal preference only. I would like to have more downloadable control looks to use. ( I think someone mentioned that they could not get rounded corners to work in control looks. A bug maybe?) I DO NOT think that Haiku should come with a bunch of different control looks. As a QA Tester, if something is installed by default than I expect that to work. So, I think that adding options to the Appearance Panel is a bad way to go.
If I download “Joe’s Pizza” control look and it doesn’t work, then that is on the person who wrote “Joe’s Pizza” control look.
If I install Haiku and choose a look that was pre-installed for me. I fully expect that to work.
Just as a casual observation. It seems to be difficult for people to create a new control look. Not sure why. But I have seen a number of people over time say they were going to make one only to give up. Can we make it easier to do?
Just to stress. I think that Haiku should come with the Default look. With maybe the “Flat” variant as it doesn’t stray vey far form the default. But anything else, this includes the Mac decor etc. Should be a separate download.
That is a way too simplified view, and I don’t think it is true, android isn’t free either. The conparison here is really just google play vs apple app store, the trends are apparent in those alone, irregardless of any third party app stores or applications (yes, those exist for iOS)
In the end both platforms shove their ideas down your throat, and are both effectively closed source.
Want to recompile android? good luck, better rent a build cluster. Oh, nevermind, there are no drivers for that specific device you want.
It’s really a choice between pest and cholera, iOS just pulls it off a lot more consistently.
Android is fully free: it have open source code, allow use various application stores or install directly from APK. Android can be installed on regular PC.
iPhone/iPad is not your hardware really. It don’t allow root access without hacking that is illegal in some countries. It don’t allow installing applications outside of Apple store. Apple can remove any application they want.
I bought the hardware, it is mine and I can do whatever I want with it. That includes circumventing access protections of the device.
I don’t care that some countries may have laws against that, there are no laws against it where I live, so why should I care?
It is absolutely my hardware, and the OS already allows installing applications outsife of the app store out of the box, if you load them via a mac computer.
The DMA will force apple to allow this without a mac too soon enough anyway, so it seems kind of pointless to try and define “freeness” over this. But then I don’t understand why you want to argue about this at all in the first place
No. I referred to @SCollins calling your opinions “evangelism”. I use Linux every day because it’s mostly usable. Do I visit their forums? No. The future is not with them. The present is what I use Linux in. The future is looking more like Haiku or others even more compactly designed with better integration yet.
As far as non-standard themes, the default theme is often not chosen by the user nor the original developer but by the guy that bundles the software with his distribution. The MIT license has no control over custom distributions. That’s part of why I want WebAssembly to standardize the ABI regardless of the CPU chosen or the OS chosen.
Out of everything discussed here recently, this is the most agreeable statement IMO. If the default ControlLook shouldn’t be very customisable, then at least make it easier to create another one.
How could that be improved upon?
Agreeing with this too, alongside dark modes/colour schemes. Think @nephele was working on this?
As for other customisations like themes and window decors, perhaps there should be a dedicated category (e.g. Customisations, Tweaks, Look and Feel, etc.) for them in HaikuDepot so that users can find these packages faster and easier.
I have not heard a single example of this, even after asking for it explicitly, so I find this incredibly hard to believe.
The platform has provisions for sideloading on purpose, there would be no way to say develop an application otherwise, so where does this wierd idea come from that using that is somehow illegal?
As a user I want consistent forced theming in my apps. If you don’t want to do that as a developer, please, as extrowerk say, write your app for another OS. I have zero interest for “inspired developers”, I just want apps that work and play well with the rest of the OS. And really what we will get is not “inspired developers”, but company branding for each app. Don’t we get enough inside and outside of our computers already?
I would be glad to have a tool allowing me to tweak control_look, but honestly if that would be fun, it could lead to a system difficult to use exactly as a wrong colour scheme can do. Seriously, when I first read about X512 plans for 3D or waddlesplash plan for wifi, I thought that was insane. But, at the end, 3D is already working for a limited amount of chipsets and wifi is in good way. So, imho, Haiku devs are full of talents and shouldn’t be limited in their ideas. Nightlies are here for development, experimenting and somehow crazy things. Let’s have fun there and see where it goes.
If someone comes up with something really pleasant, it may be a nice surprise and a keeper otherwise not everything is meant to make it in next beta anyway.
Releases shouldn’t content stuff that may render the system unusable because of user’s theming or colours scheme. So, except obviously default ones, other control_looks and decorators should go in extras package.
Beta3 was already solid enough to be users main target and beta4 will be even better; those using nightlies are doing it at their own risk.
“The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act guarantees that consumers can unlock or let others unlock their phones. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rooting was illegal in the United States except by exemption .”
This is true, and I find it funny that people always say “Linux is so much more customizable than (insert any OS here)” yet over the years people (except KDE thankfully) have seemed to care less about themes now more than ever for some ungodly reason.
Yet let’s go on the Windows side, XP/Vista/7 have full msstyle themes that can customize every little trinket in the UI along with custom sounds, cursors, and icons which may not work exactly like they did on newer versions like 8 and 10, but there’s tools like Open Shell which do work on 8 and 10 and can heavily customize lots of elements of the UI as many other tools can.
Not to mention LiteStep, a desktop shell for Windows, is a lot more customizable than anything you’ll find on Linux. It has dozens of plugins to do pretty much anything you want, and hunderds of themes making use of these plugins.
That’s not quite correct, or at least this statement is an oxymoron. “source available” usually refers to proprietary software were the source code is made available with certain restrictions. Often the source code is only available to specific customers of the software, and cannot be distributed and sometimes not even modified (only view it, e.g. to inspect the functionality for secrurity audits).
The code in AOSP on the other hand is free software, and there are various open source distributions based on AOSP available.
Your statement that Android as distributed by the various device manufacturers contain various proprietary parts is of course correct, most notably the Google Play stuff. But AOSP itself runs without this. The more troubling part are drivers for specific devices, though.
That is not a diffenition I have ever heard nor one I agree with, most usages if the term open source or free software imply that the software is developed in the open, that isn’t the case for AOSP, hence my usage of the term source available.
Also, this was in response to the above post that called android “fully free” (also based on the state of source availability), which I disagree with.
** sounds of non-developer UI aesthe and ex ‘aaron’ and ‘kaleidoscope’ fan cheering **