Oh good, I always look forward to condescending GNOME apologists to reply to my comments. Let's disseminate this comment and use it to help understand why me, OP, and hundreds of other people in this thread are frustrated with the state of GTK and GNOME right now:

> People have been working on the font glitch for the last ten months. It's not easy and the solution is not straightforward.

Then why was it working fine in GTK3? Sounds to me like someone made a breaking change, and didn't anticipate the consequences. The solution is to roll things back or wait until this new implimentation is fixed to push the code to actual users. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers are more interested in scorching earth than they are in maintaining a well-made desktop.

Oh, and it's not because it's a "hard issue" to fix, it's because nobody made a PR for several months. Apparently none of the core maintainers considered it much of a problem.

> The choice of whether to allow themes or not belongs to the app developer. This hasn't changed at all from GTK3.

No, it doesn't. There is not a single application written with GTK3 that can stop me from changing it's theme. I'm sorry if you disagree, but that's just an outright lie (I say this as someone who actually writes GTK3 code).

> The stylesheet isn't forced at all, when you develop an app you can configure your styles to always override the platform theme.

...and I can override it again. Any questions?

> Pinning your packages to GTK3 in protest doesn't help you.

Correction, it doesn't help you. It keeps my applications looking just fine.

> It doesn't make a difference to the GTK developers at all.

That seems to be a recurring trend when negotiating with GNOME/GTK developers. I don't care, I'm perfectly satisfied taking matters into my own hands since they'll ignore me anyways.

> If you want to make use of some GTK4 features eventually, it would be best to start working with it and getting your issues sorted out now.

I don't. What features are there, right now? Worse text rendering? Less accessibility features? More extreme, abrasive maintainers and fewer people writing code? A worse native experience, more middleware and less software freedom? Less native packaging? More Flatpak bloat? Worse touchscreen compatibility and an increasingly fractured codebase? More broken custom widgets that don't adhere to the GNOME HIG? An uglier, flatter overall design philosophy? Militant users and developers who hunt people down when they express their feelings about software they used to use on Hacker News?

Worse looking buttons?

You can keep it.

> You can ignore what the other app maintainers are saying, that has no effect on you.

I don't even know what you're trying to say here, but it sounds like doublespeak. This entire comment does, actually, and I'm not sure what your goal was by posting this. Nothing you've said accurately describes the reality of using GTK applications, it's more like an idyllic reflection of what people think the ecosystem should look like, ignoring everyone who doesn't throw away their current workflow to live in GNOME-land. Unless you start acknowledging the pragmatic reality of GTK's end-users, GNOME will continue to hemorrhage maintainers and stir up unnecessary and counterproductive drama for the sake of a few people's ego. And to think that what I said was nonsense, get a grip...