Question: GNOME theming on Bluefin - what's with the window buttons?

[c-avendano]

Hello! I have a question about theming GNOME (oh no!) on Bluefin (double oh no! haha!)

Out of curiosity I downloaded a couple of gtk themes and placed them on home/my_username/.themes. All’s good, GNOME Tweaks can access them and I see my shell changing accordingly. But whenever I select these themes, the window buttons (maximize, minimize, close) don’t change at all. Is there something I’m missing, or an extension that might be overriding the theme?

Thanks in advance! Love how Bluefin introduced me to distrobox containers-- I’m never going back to “regular” distros for my main pc

[inffy]

You might need to activate the “User themes” extension and then set the shell theme from the Tweaks app.

But just a warning, it might break some apps but its easy to test and turn off if smething goes wrong

[c-avendano]

Yeah, I did that already. I actually needed to do it so I could find the installed themes on the first place. That’s why I’m so confused at the moment, I don’t see a reason for the window buttons to “escape” the customization…

[Plyply]

Can you screenshot what you mean?

[c-avendano]

Sure! Here’s a screenshot as an example. I applied the Whitesur Light Nord theme-- it’s clearly selected on Gnome Tweaks, and I can clearly see the windows changing color and even the little apple logo at the top. But the window control buttons remain the same as stock Gnome. That’s what I was wondering about.

[Plyply]

Have you set flatpak permissions for theming?
Here is my desktop and theming does work you just have to jump through a couple more hoops so to speak.

[c-avendano]

Awesome! Do you remember what you did for that, exactly? I tried going into flatseal and giving all apps permission for my themes folder but that doesn’t seem to have changed things:

[Plyply]

Sure!

sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0
sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0
flatpak --user override --filesystem=/home/$USER/.local/share/icons/:ro
flatpak --user override --filesystem=/usr/share/icons/:ro

Make sure you do a logout or restart for it to take effect.

[c-avendano]

Thanks! That seems to have changes some things at least, but now I’m confused again…!

This approach seems to have worked for Firefox and Chrome (both flatpaks) but nothing happened to the File Browser or any other flatpaks I have (in this example, Alpaca). Do you or anyone else happen to have any ideas?

[Plyply]

I’m thinking the directions for your theme are outdated maybe.
Putting it all in ~/.themes isn’t the best way and will cause problems.
You should be using XDG standards.
So the files you put in ~/.themes should go in ~/.local/share/themes.

Also inside your themes directory you should see a couple directories gtk-3.0 and gtk-4.0 Copy those directories to ~/.config

And of course logout to take effect.

[c-avendano]

Thank you so much! This seems to have done the trick.

I hadn’t messed with GNOME in a long time, so I really appreciate the breakdown of directories and XDG standards.