Pidgin and some other apps look bad in new fedora 34

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

I did fresh install of Fedora 34 (workstation) yesterday. And pidgin and some other applications do not respect default gnome theme. On my previous installation (F32, originally F28 or simillar, upgraded over time) every app looked just fine out of the box. Both current and previous installations are using Gnome on Wayland.

Is it known bug? Is there some workaround I should use? I wasn’t able to find any other mention of this behaviour, but its hard for me to orient myself around many information sources fedora community uses.

[lapor (Kristijan Tkalec)]

What is the installation package used here? (flatpak, snap, rpm)
Did you installed it from software center or from terminal?

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

I may have installed it by dnf or software center I am not sure now. But it is definitelly an rpm package as I can see pidgin-2.14.1-3.fc34.x86_64 installed and no flatpak.

[jask@hal3042 ~]$ flatpak list
Název                  ID aplikace                       Verze        Větev       Instalace
Fedora Platform        org.fedoraproject.Platform        34           f34         system

EDIT: At least I think so. I have zero experience with flatpaks.

[lapor (Kristijan Tkalec)]

Ok, it’s not flatpak. Do all of the apps have win95 look or just some? Apps that were preinstalled look ok?

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

Only two applications with broken theme I’ve encountered so far are Pidgin and KeePassX. Both installed from rpm. All the other apps preinstalled and even installed by me look as they are supposed to. I’ve tried to hint on that by taking screenshot with nautilus window. But I should have been more precise.

[nickavem (Andrew Thurman)]

Try installing adwaita-gtk2-theme:

sudo dnf install adwaita-gtk2-theme

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

Thanks, that did the trick. To be honest it did not occur to me that Gnome’s main IM client could still use gtk2. Well I suppose it would be better if it was pidgin’s dependency anyway.

[nickavem (Andrew Thurman)]

Pidgin is very outdated and definitely not GNOME’s main IM client anymore. I’d recommend you take a look at Fractal and/or Polari.

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

Oh I didn’t hear about those. I remember time when Fedora switched from Pidgin to Empathy. But it was discontinued afterwards and pidgin was again recommended as substitute. And I use pidgin since then. If there were some new alternatives they probably didn’t get pre-installed into fedora or I somehow missed them.

I’ll definitely check them. Thank you for you help.

[jask (Jan Skrle)]

Ok, I’ve checked those recommendations and they are quite different from what I expected. I use pidgin as general purpose IM client which is possible thanks to great extensibility of purple library. To be exact I use Pidgin for Facebook, Telegram and sometimes jabber. As far I can tell Fractal is Matrix client and Polari is IRC client. Maybe I am wrong but I don’t think they are relevant to my use-case.