Why changing theme of gnome-shell requires extension?

Why changing theme of gnome-shell requires installing user-themes extension?

Because, strictly speaking, GNOME Shell does not have themes. It has support for styling for St widget with CSS stylesheets, but that is not a theme.

The user-themes extension adds the ability for users to re-style GNOME Shell and share them with others as stylesheets.

I mean exactly that, but wondering, why I need extension to changing stylesheets?

What is theme then?

Because it’s not a supported feature, so it’s offered as a extension.

Presumably it’s the idea of a fixed user interface, where the layout and appearance of its elements can be altered in a systematic and predictable way. But however you define it, changing themes or stylesheets comes with no guarantees, therefore it is offered as an extension.

Sorry, I worded my question wrong… I mean what extension do to gnome-shell? Modifing variable of stylesheet path or?

That particular extension ships with a GSettings schema that holds a theme name as a string. When the settings key changes, the extension ensures a file called gnome-shell.css exists in an expected directory and then calls a couple functions to load it.

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