Enabling dark style does nothing (GNOME 44, NixOS 23.11)

Desktop
1

A while ago I played around with some mind mapping application. I think it was Freeplane. I selected a color theme and it asked me if I wanted it do adapt my system settings accordingly.
I stupidly agreed and since then all applications are in light theme. I can enable dark mode in the quick settings, the settings → appearance menu or dconf, but none of it has an effect.
It seems like the application changed some setting in a way that is honored by everything, but can’t be changed or isn’t officially supported.
I tried resetting the appearance settings in gnome-tweaks as well as in dconf to no avail.
Anyone got an idea where that setting might be hiding?

Cheers,
Chais

2

This definitely sounds like something that should be reported to the project in question too, they should not do such things.

3

Is there maybe a ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css or ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css that got created by the application?

4

No. Those files exist, but both only import their respective colors.css, which holds the colors defined by KDE to match its theme. I switch between DEs now and then.

5

Overriding the colors this way could prevent dark mode from working. Try removing/renaming those files and restarting your session.

6

rm -vfr .config/gtk* didn’t solve it, I’m afraid. I also checked with Freeplane, they don’t offer such a functionality.
Additionally I tried reproducing the issue in a VM, so I might be able to easily diff two snapshots to find where the change is made, but so far I haven’t been able to reproduce the behaviour with Freeplane or FreeMind.

7

What is the output of ps ux | grep xdg-desktop-portal? Maybe some non-gnome portal implementation is running that is overriding the dark mode.

8 
$ ps ux|grep xdg-desktop-portal
chais       2472  0.0  0.0 524428  6528 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /nix/store/jc34jhq5p54ycsryjbbwswmnm1v5s7np-xdg-desktop-portal-1.16.0/libexec/xdg-permission-store
chais       2966  0.0  0.0 763716 14976 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /nix/store/jc34jhq5p54ycsryjbbwswmnm1v5s7np-xdg-desktop-portal-1.16.0/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
chais       2976  0.0  0.0 748200  6528 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /nix/store/jc34jhq5p54ycsryjbbwswmnm1v5s7np-xdg-desktop-portal-1.16.0/libexec/xdg-document-portal
chais       2985  0.0  0.0 920192 27776 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /nix/store/d3ab1d7h5gw37dvw2cl31rl8s3ji6c9g-xdg-desktop-portal-gnome-44.1/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
chais       3007  0.0  0.0 630352 24964 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /nix/store/rzpzhk9rx5fv601g7cxf72vs05dzhwj7-xdg-desktop-portal-gtk-1.14.1/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

Nope. Only gnome, GTK and the base-implementation.

9

Checking Nautilus with the inspector got me this:
image
Not sure if the unset GTK theme could be cause of effect of the lack of a dark theme. It’s not like that in a fresh install, at least. Any idea how to fix it?

10

That was the hint I needed. I had a GTK_THEME variable set in a config file in .config/environment.d. Once I deleted the file and restarted gnome the dark theme started working again.

11

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