Debian 13 minimal - Dark Theme: Adwaita-dark

whoami · December 14, 2025, 1:16pm

I used to have ‘Adwaita-dark’ working in my Debian 12 minimal Qubes. With my auto-generation script for Qubes, the Debian 13 minimal template won’t switch to ‘Adwaita-dark’ anymore.

What changed from Debian 12 to 13 about ‘Adwaita-dark’ and ‘GTK’ (packages and config)?

I’ve tried many packages and configs for days without success.
Here are the packages I currently have:

adwaita-icon-theme
libadwaita-1-0
gnome-shell-extension-user-theme
dconf-gsettings-backend
gnome-tweaks
gnome-control-center

I also test with:

gnome-themes-extra
gsettings-desktop-schemas
gnome-shell-extension-user-theme

Config files for GTK3 are set: settings.ini

[Settings]
gtk-font-name=Adwaita Sans 12
gtk-theme-name=Adwaita-dark
gtk-icon-theme-name=Adwaita
gtk-decoration-layout=menu:
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1

[AdwStyleManager]
color-scheme=ADW_COLOR_SCHEME_PREFER_DARK

I have verified all gsettings:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme
'Adwaita-dark'

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme
'Adwaita-dark'

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme
'Adwaita'

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme
'prefer-dark'

Nautilus is still light theme

I am looking for light (only mandatory packages) and scriptable solution (no manual UI config).
Anyone here, who has a working Debian 13 minimal dark theme?

ephile · December 14, 2025, 2:11pm

I haven’t worked on this yet, but will appreciate knowing the solution. The following looks promising wrt gtk-4:

where the simple solution is:

Add

GTK_THEME=Adwaita-dark

to /etc/environment

andreasglashauser · December 14, 2025, 2:14pm

Personally, my salt state for setting up darkmode does two things:

It creates /etc/profile.d/darkmode.sh:

        #!/bin/bash
        export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
        export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Adwaita-dark
        export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark

It creates /etc/environment:
QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2

But i think that the answer of @ephile above mine is also valid.

Edit: I use minimal templates for setting up my qubes, and I never had to install an additional package.

Another note: I know I have redundancy in these two things I do in my salt states, but this made it work when I tried to set it up and it wasnt a priority for me which of the things are needed and which are not.

ephile · December 14, 2025, 3:04pm

tested and failed, but thanks to @andreasglashauser I tried the following and it worked (dark:mode thunar in debian-13-minimal):

echo "GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark" >> /etc/environment

whoami · December 18, 2025, 5:02pm

I did some progress: Nautilus is almost perfect.

Still some icon issue.

with adwaita-icon-theme and gnome-shell-extension-user-theme you get the icons

but there are still some minor but odd textbox format issue in some text elements:

as a reference Debian 13 (default, not minimal template)

proper left “Files” bar coloring
big icons (when folder is empty)
proper textbox

For QT applications, I benchmarked KeePassXC
Here, you need to set

QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Adwaita-dark
QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2 does not work anymore for Debian 13 (minimal)