[Can't Fix] i3wm: GTK and Qt theming settings not working in Flatpak applications.

[warm spade]

Lately I have been playing around with i3wm and I like it a lot.
Unfortunately, the biggest roadblock for me now seems to be that theming on Flatpak applications doesn't seem to work properly. I have set the appearance of GTK apps using lxappearance and of Qt apps with qt5ct.
Neither settings had an effect on Flatpak applications and it seems to me that it has something to do with xdg-desktop-portals.

The picture displays the issue. VLC and Nemo are normal system applications, while Flatseal and Master PDF Editor are Flatpak. The font style and size doesn't match at all.

I have already attempted editing the following configuration files, without any success:

`~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/i3-portal.conf

[preferred]
default=gtk;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Secret=gnome-keyring;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Settings=gtk;i3;`

`/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/gtk.portal

[portal]
DBusName=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk
Interfaces=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.AppChooser;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Print;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Notification;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Inhibit;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Access;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Account;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Email;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.DynamicLauncher;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Lockdown;org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Settings;
UseIn=gnome;i3`

The attached text file contains the output of $ /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal -rv

So what am I missing? How can I solve this issue?

[warm spade]

Has no one else ever had this issue? I really like i3 but if I can't find a solution I might have to give it up...

[warm spade]

hello? I still haven't found a solution...

[warm spade]

[sage reef]

try running sudo flatpak override --filesystem=/home/$USER/.config then restarting

[warm spade]

this didn't work, but i found that the variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is empty by default? I might have to find a way to run while Xorg starts but I'm not sure where to do that. Is Mint so heavily modified in this regard that it just doesn't work properly outside their DEs? really strange...

[sage reef]

If xdg_config_home isn't set then it just defaults to $HOME/.config

On a separate note, if you plan on using a different DE than the 3 official ones then I'd recommend you use a different distro since most of linux mint's development is focused around them

[warm spade]

Yeah, I've been trying to fix this the whole week already and I think I am going to just give up on this. I'll just use cinnamon if I need to use these apps a lot and keep playing around with i3 for other things. Switching distros is currently not an option for me, I don't have enough time atm. Thanks for your help anyways

[Can't Fix] i3wm: GTK and Qt theming settings not working in Flatpak applications.

[warm spade]

I actually managed to fix the GTK issue! All it took was creating config files in .config/gtk-4.0 and creating some overrides for these directories in Flatpak.

[warm spade]

Does anyone know how I could do something similar with qt? My current workaround is setting environment variables for font size but I don't know how I can change the font family that way.

[sage reef]

you can use qt5ct and qt6ct

[warm spade]

That didn't quite work. Adding some more config files made some stuff work but not everything, so I substitute that with variables. 🙃 At least now I have a comfortable setup and can hopefully move past this