Artix Linux Forum

FYI artix-branding-base doesn't have anything to do with gui themes, and is not a dependency of the other pkgs. I would advice against removing that.

Well yes but when you're starting to remove more than what's needed you're getting at the soul of the distro here and it's uncomfortable.
Also in all honesty only the gtk/qt-presets packages can have conflicting files with themes, if even.
Even artix-desktop-presets won't conflict as all of it's files are in /etc/skel so free to modify by the homedir after that.

I'm not interested in which of these completely non-standard packages do what and don't think most people are either.

I also know if I remove them then some update wont come along in the future and break something in my configs.

Now, if you want to talk about uncomfortable, search the word "theme" and look at all of the instances of people asking for help with their themes and the people helping them are like: *surprised pikachu face* "What is this completely unexplainable phenomena? Edit this config as a workaround" [SOLVED/PEBKAC]...

Or as the person who convinced me to try Artix put it:
"One bad thing about, the GUI isos come with a default custom theme that's a pain in the ass to disable."

Other distros do much, much more (or worse, for your sake). Did you see that despite you mentioned it twice, i still didn't tell you to "go make your own" until now?

Heavy Qt themer here, nothing broke in 2 years. Gtk got broken once by stupid wxwidgets, not even by the css artix puts in that preset package (2 if you you count -desktop-presets with /etc/skel which i'm not sure pacman will mess with on an existing user account).

I'm not wasting energy to explain each of those 5-6 that i counted threads with potential conflicts due to the default theming here. Also in that thread, sorry for my nonchalance, but the OP was clueless and the issue came from elsewhere, something in /etc/environment which was rectified.

I have nothing against this guide or how you put the issue, this is also the first time i'm mentioning it. Why do you feel attacked about a FYI?

1: You don't have these packages installed
2: You don't change anything that would conflict with these packages (Which would include changing things within these packages as something that does not conflict)

...these non-standard packages of zero utility...

I feel like this is projection.

I'm not interested in which of these completely non-standard packages do what

Incidentally Mao is highly regarded and revered in China as a founding father of their society, they have memorials and statues in his honour. Different side to the story. Some big Artix supporters in China, check your mirror list.

If you look at the pebkac thread then you would have seen the post about the Base iso being the only officially supported iso, which has no theming, the others are there for convenience.

Also incidentally if he wants to make the argument about Mao being totalitarian, well mindlessly mentioning what's good for the "vast majority of users" is making him exactly like that, doesn't it?

I have those packages installed, i only remove NetworkManager and some video things.
There are user facing configs, maybe there are DE settings overwriting some (mostly Gtk) configs - where in the case of css stylesheets for gtk2/3 maybe - but in the case of Qt all the plugins and themes have their respective place and a conflict would be impossible unless you set QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE which to my knowledge is not longer set in env by default. I myself use Kvantum in the case of Qt, with lxqt-qt6plugin-git.

At least you could've told us which DE do you use, in my case LXQt+KWin is making clear what configs it targets.
If you worry so much about this, then why don't you complain about the real anti-theming problems happening currently: Gnome's libadawaita and KDE's kirigami

Yeah okay.

I don't want to continue further since I have a position here and I won't lose it over a debate. I will let the admins judge from here.

That throws up a couple of of thoughts to me.
Like what is the standard? If your talking Arch as the 'standard' then removing all non standard packages would leave you with no init.
If Artix is the standard then they are standard packages when installing from a GUI iso.

More importantly if you are writing a guide on de-theming an Artix GUI install I'd have thought taking an interest in what the packages you are encouraging people to remove actually do would be fairly important.

artix-branding-base is a special case. If you look inside the package, in /etc/local.d/ you'll see some scripts which don't exist, or are modified, after a reboot, when they are first executed. Removing artix-branding-base will not revert the changes that these files made.
Also of concern is that artix-branding-base contains /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-name-slot.rules as a symlink to /dev/null

Now I tested on my system and the removal of this file is not causing my network devices names to change but Artix has many inits and methods of installation and I wouldn't be confident saying that no one without that file will have the same network device names the next reboot after removing it.

So there's a chance someone follows your guide, reboots, and then has no network ?

I'm not against the concept of the guide. Personally I don't install from iso's (except quick short lived VM's) as I prefer close to vanilla as well but for the record I do have artix-branding-base installed. Most of what it does are things I would do myself if I hadn't installed it eg. /etc/rc.local & /etc/sysctl.d/99_magic_sysrq.conf

 Maybe a checkbox at install time would fit everybody's taste. Those more experienced tick the box while the others let it as is.

If my wireshark-qt UI would look better without artix-branding I would remove it but I don't think I'm lucky enough by just doing that.

 I for one I like artix branding but I'm no expert in themes but just an average Joe 🧑🏻‍🌾

If we go down the path of "other people do worse", then nobody has done anything wrong since Mao

Well it might be pedantic and rather off topic but to elaborate my point, it seems not widely understood in some places, but Chairman Mao is a great hero in China and his childhood home is preserved as a museum and there is the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing. The Anglo / Euro / US version of events is biased from their colonial influence over China being ended. From the mainstream Chinese perspective he saved them from the bad guys. Richard the Lionheart is a hero in the UK but not so popular in the Middle East, Alexander the Great is Alexander the Devil in some of the places he conquered, and they killed lots of people too. It's just not a great example on an international forum because that statement won't make sense to anyone from China or might even cause offense to Chinese contributors (and there are some) if no-one were to question it, and obviously it's a good thing for Artix to keep them on board, but I am not undervaluing your help in writing this guide either.