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Glad to see usability improvements here, but I won't be using it until there's a light theme (asking an application to respect the OS theme is apparently too much these days).



I had to hard facepalm reading the other replies to this. There are people suffering from things like Astigmatism (myself included) who have an extremely hard time, including headaches, using dark themes. People really need to be a bit more empathetic.

Also, as the OP pointed out, people somehow get angry when all you asked is for an app to follow the system's theme. It has been such a huge regression.

EDIT: typos and clarity


> Astigmatism

Wait, is this why I've stopped liking dark mode? I was diagnosed with astigmatism a few years ago. Never connected the two until now.

I find it physically unpleasant to look at during daylight hours, in a way I can't explain to my coworkers.


As a counter example I too suffer from astigmatism and I prefer dark themes with high contrast. Sometimes I'll pick a theme that doesn't exactly vibe color wise just for the high contrast otherwise it's hard to focus, both mentally and actually reading what's on the screen.

I also zoom in most websites, UIs, code editors and the terminal, so take my personal experience as just another point and nothing definitive.


Yep it is quite possible. For me the realization wasn't until the doctor specifically pointed it out that no lens will 100% correct Astigmatism. Then I googled around and read that dark text on light bg is much easier because the ghosting is less pronounced.

I miss my white-on-black Terminal though :(


> Also, as the OP pointed out, people somehow get angry when all you asked is for an app to follow the system's theme. It has been such a huge regression.

Was there a time when Podman Desktop supported a light mode? You could change the CSS yourself, which given you only need a light mode, would be pretty trivial.

Please keep in mind that dark themes were introduced as an accessibility feature as well, but not every project can or will prioritize it.


My bad, I did not mean a regression in Podman Desktop specifically, but UI engineering in general. A (couple of?) decades ago it was basically a given that apps will adjust to your system theme (except fancy stuff like Winamp).


Welcome to the club. So many things still don't support a dark theme either. Why aren't dark/light modes standard these days? Super annoying to have to hide a bunch of light mode windows when I'm in a meeting as they reflect brightly off my glasses.


1997: Now you can completely customize the window UI with any colors you like!

2023: We have no plans to have our UI not blind you past 8pm.


That's because before Mac OS X theming was nearly free for apps, so long as they didn't override colors from the OS widgets.

Once Apple started dictating UI fashion you'll take it as is or inverted. If you have different needs then go pound sand. After a decade or so they suddenly discovered dark modes are a thing.

The move to the web also took some pressure off because you can override colors in your browser ... Unless you have a per-app browser locked inside Electron or similar.


Thank god some (native desktop) software is still sane about this. Look at Blender's granularity! https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/142666/how-can-i...


Windows 3.1 had Hot Dog Stand and was very configurable. ~1991.


A very Hacker-News complaint, if I’ve ever seen one.



[deleted]


Dark mode causes more issues than light mode for a lot of conditions. Providing only a darkmode is worse than providing only a light mode, IMO.


Every OS has “system” colors. Even with non-native widgets, I have no idea why people don’t use those.


    lynx gopher://hngopher.com


HNcute for chrome still works nicely!

https://caro.io/hn-cute


The Dark Reader browser extension works for HN.


Chrome has a force-dark-mode option in the :config too with heuristics on how to change things with different modes.




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