Flatpak apps title bar not respecting dark mode

Ask Fedora
1

Hi,

I suddenly have white title bar and menus in most of my flatpak apps (not thunderbird or brave, though). This behavior is recent, less than a week I would say. I haven’t (knowingly) changed any theme-related stuff, and have never done any flatpak specific configuration, just installing and updating everything. Any ideas how I can fix this?

Thanks

PS. I’ve seen other threads on this, but rather old and the solutions didn’t work.

2

It’s difficult to answer this without more information. Which specific apps are affected? What desktop environment are you using? What version of Fedora?

Some screenshots could be helpful as well.

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3

Fedora 39 Workstation (Gnome), everything up to date every day. I realize it is not limited to flatpak packages, so the issue is different than I thought. It seems to affect the Gnome frame, which isn’t used by all programs apparently, so my browsers, thunderbird and Obsidian seemed unaffected. It doesn’t affect the menu bar in all apps, such as R Studio as you can see here, nor the menu that appears in Thunderbird when you press the Alt key but which disappears as soon as I Prt-Scrn. (I guess some apps draw their own menus while others rely on Gnome?)

I only have 4 Gnome extensions installed, and disabling them doesn’t seem to help. I haven’t changed any appearance settings aside from choosing Dark mode.

I’m pretty new to Gnome, and know about dconf, but not how to use it. I installed the editor gui from flathub to start poking around, perhaps I’ll learn something.

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

(If I hallucinated having dark title bars, and they’ve always been ugly white background, please tell me and I’ll go away. It’s possible.)

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4

Are these apps using X11 or Wayland?

Those aren’t the default minimize and maximize icons; have you changed the icon theme in GNOME Tweaks? (that’s not really relevant, but I’m trying to understand what I’m looking at)

Have you tried setting the ‘legacy’ theme in Tweaks to Adwaita-dark? You’ll need to install the gnome-themes-extra package.

5

Thank you so much. I didn’t know about GNOME Tweaks, but I went in and changed everything to Adwaita-dark and all is well again. Which begs the question… for another day. I’m pretty new to GNOME, having mainly used KDE and xfce before that, so it’s great to learn these things :slight_smile: