Sad news for fans of Gradience, the 3rd-party tool to customise the look of GTK4/libadwaita apps, as this weekend (June 29, 2024) the Github project page was made read-only and archived.

News is sure to drain the colour from those who avidly use this tool, as it has proven popular with those seeing to personalise the libadwaita stylesheet to better suit their tastes.

But this move isn’t entirely out of the blue.

In April, Gradience added a note to top of its Github page mentioning that the app was “looking for a maintainer(s)! if you know Python and GTK4/Libadwaita and willing to work on it, chip in on Matrix and Discord.”

Two months later and a new maintainer is yet to come forward. So the decision has been taken to archive the repository entirely to stop bugs from being filed and, effectively, stop giving people hope that a new release will come any time soon.

In post on the Gradience Discord, the tool’s primary developer David Lapshin (daudix) explains: –

“Archiving the project […] will make it clear that Gradience is, well, unmaintained, and will prevent the issue tracker from being filled with duplicates asking when new release will be out/why nautilus sidebar is white.”

“And, if someone will want to maintain it one day, it can always be unarchived with a press of a button.”

Gradience needs a maintainer

Gradience last made a new stable release in March 2023, when v0.4.1 was released as a bug fix update.

A beta build of a planned v0.8 release was made available to test last August, adding the much-requested ability to customise the look of the stock GNOME Shell ‘theme’, a smattering of keyboard shortcuts, and refactored code.

But in the intervening time newer versions GNOME, GTK4, and libadwaita have been issued. These, naturally, include some stylesheet changes, new classes, tweaks, etc., to which Gradience isn’t in sync with, ergo some ‘features’ of the app don’t currently work.

Of course, in Ubuntu we already have a custom theme (Yaru) in use (although it won’t apply to most GTK4/libadwaita apps installed from Flathub), and an accent colour ‘hack’ (though GNOME 47 adds accent colour support properly).

Interested in taking over?

Hopefully this isn’t the end of Gradience.

As I repeat ad nauseum whenever I have to cover development troubles in FOSS efforts: nothing can be dead in open-source, and anyone can take the code to resurrect or reincarnate it, giving it new life.

If you think you could be the person to do that, reach out to the project (the Discord and Matrix remain active). As Gradience is built in Python and GTK4/libadwaita you’ll need familiarity with those, and a good understanding of CSS.

• Get Gradience on Flathub