Make Granite look good on Adwaita

[pongloongyeat]

Problem

Currently, some Granite widgets look quite broken with the Adwaita stylesheet (see images below). Although Granite was made to complement elementary apps, this can be extended to the Adwaita stylesheet so it will encourage more adoption of Granite and eventually (and hopefully) elementaryOS. This will introduce quite a lot of maintenance debt.

Proposal

Make Granite widgets look good with Adwaita (or at least not broken). Note that this feature request is mostly to pull users in and achieve more adoption of use of Granite.

Broken-looking widgets

Accel labels in menus

Style Classes

Dynamic Notebook

SwitchModelButton margins

SettingsSidebar margins

SourceList badges

StorageBar

Dialogs

[pongloongyeat]

As a side note, you could also publish some elementary system apps on FlatHub to showcase Granite to users/devs of other distros.

[cassidyjames]

We may be able to include fallback styles in Granite widgets so they aren't totally broken on Adwaita or other stylesheets. The largest concern in my mind is indeed the maintenance burden, though, as it would either mean duplicating a lot of styles (between the Granite fallbacks and the elementary Stylesheet) or moving lots of styling out of the stylesheet and into Granite in general, plus regularly testing it on Adwaita and other popular stylesheets to ensure some amount of compatibility.

This would also mean less flexibility on our side of guaranteeing we can alter Granite styling system-wide with the stylesheet, and would require re-building and re-releasing all apps if a styling change is made.

[pongloongyeat]

Adwaita and other popular stylesheets to ensure some amount of compatibility.

Perhaps it could just be Adwaita? Most custom themes have stylings for whatever Adwaita has and not more so I feel like Adwaita is the upper line here.

would require re-building and re-releasing all apps

Does it really? Can you not re-release just Granite for all users and push via apt upgrade?

Also, if this idea does get picked up, Granite.Dialog could be the first to kick off and it'd be great if Granite.Dialog is sub-classed as a Hdy.Window so the headerbar wouldn't show on Adwaita. Not sure if this is the best idea but it just came to mind.

[hanaral]

I thought the idea was to use flatpak to enforce the elementary stylesheet and stop pretending that gtk=gnome