Themes on linux

Written by on Read time: 1 min

I recently got fed up with some of my applications having white text on a white background, and just overall my system themes being all wonky.

I tried all kinds of janky solutions, but ultimately I think the choises that mattered were ~/.gtkrc-2.0, ~/.config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. I installed qt5ct-kde from AUR, which I think configured some of the things. Then I went over the files and made sure that they had the same names for the theme: Matcha-dark-aliz. It seems to be one that works consistently, unlike whatever dark theme I was using before.

However… flatpak

Flatpak apps however were still godawfully bright. After a short investigation into this, I figured out that it was due to me not running the xsettingsd daemon on start and also not having had installed the org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Matcha-dark-aliz flatpak application.

For xsettingsd I had to create the file ~/.config/xsettingsd/xsettingsd.conf and write Net/ThemeName "Matcha-dark-aliz" into it.

I hope that someone else can avoid the hours of research I had to do to accomplish dark themes by reading this short blurb about how I managed it on my Arch+i3+Xorg based linux system.