Several months ago after installing kdelinux in one of my tower’s SSDs, i successfully setup QEMU/KVM/libvirt/virt-manager per the nice method here . It seems to work ok, albeit some of virt-manager’s normal features are unavailable, alas. My biggest problem with it though is that so far i have been unable to make it respect my desktop’s dark theme, or indeed make it use any dark colouring, so instead it is a horrible blinding bright white. It hurts my eyes to use it in daylight, but is entirely impossible for me at night [i literally must wait til the following daytime to use it again].
Please, can someone who understands, guide me as to how i can make it dark?
As context, i’ve used it for years in tower’s other boot, ArchLinux Plasma, where it entirely respects my dark theme. However, there it is via Repo, not Flatpak.
Yes i mean virt-manager & thus all its VMs are not running in dark mode… hence the “blinding white”. I am not talking about any of the distros i run within the VMs, i am talking about the VMs themselves, ie, virt-manager , which window is blinding white.
I might be wrong but i suspect your experience on Fedora KDE is not relevant to my problem directly, because your system is mutable. I posted specifically in the kdelinux tag here because my subject system for this problem iskdelinux, ie, the immutable system, which makes some operations that are easy on a mutable system harder or impossible. I am really hoping though that someone already knows a kdelinux-centric solution
Adapting a bit from the results I found from a search, this seems to work:
GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark flatpak run org.virt_manager.virt-manager
Give that a go, and if it meets your needs, you could edit the application from the launcher (or edit the Flatpak settings in the “Application Permissions” bit of the system settings) to set GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark as an environment variable.
Thank you. Tomorrow i plan to boot back into kdelinux after the past few weeks happily running my Arch Plasma boot, so i shall try this then. Tbh atm i am apprehensive, because iirc i had already tried setting a GTK theme as an env var in the app permissions for virt-manager in the Plasma System Settings, but maybe i made a mistake… hopefully i did, as then with luck your suggestion might work well
Well that looks marvellously encouraging! Would you pls be kind enough to type out here the full Path you used in the first field? I suspect that might be where i made my error.
Something else you could try, instead of setting the environment variable.
In the application permissions, give the app read-only access to the directory xdg-config/gtk-3.0.
Currently this is set by default for Firefox on KDE Linux, but not for other apps. (Setting it for all apps is under discussion.)
I’m curious as to whether enabling this access will enable the virt-manager Flatpak to pick up your dark theme preference, without having to explicitly set it in the environment variable.
Repeating it without that space then gives no error, which i assumed to mean silent success, but then launching virt-manager just blinds me once again with its arctic whiteness
Next i intended to try
but when i went to do so, i decided it seems to be pointlessly redundant, given by default afaict it already has RW access:
The thing that did finally work was the original suggestion:
so now happily virt-manager no longer blinds me – thank you!
However, both of you had success with those other two methods, neither of which worked for me, so afaict there is still something wrong at my end that i don’t understand I presume this means that for me atm other flatpak apps might also not follow my dark theme, given the global fix seems not to have changed anything here.
That’s not by default, it’s because you had already run run0 flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0. But yes, trying to do it in the Application Permissions GUI is redundant once you have run that command.
I guess your GTK theme settings are different from @ngraham 's? But I never really touch this stuff myself (I’m happy with Breeze Light everywhere) so I don’t know the ins and outs of this I’m afraid.
I wonder if this specific theme isn’t available inside the Flatpak, and it falls back to a light theme rather than respecting the gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true setting.
There are other dark themes that can be installed from Flathub for use in Flatpak apps (see flatpak search gtk3theme | sort ) but Dracula unfortunately isn’t among them.
but none of those subsequently showed up in System Settings - Colors & Themes - Application Style - GNOME/GTK Application Style, so… i gave up again, sigh.
– thank you!
I presume this means that for me atm other flatpak apps might also not follow my dark theme, given the global fix seems not to have changed anything here.