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How to change Qubes OS to Dark mode

Credits goes to

Anon81475885, Sven & Szewcu - Guide: Xfce global dark mode in Qubes 4.0 / 4.1
Previous Highlight7 - https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/v032iv/how_to_enable_dark_for_gtk4_apps/

Instructions

Dom0

  1. For Dom0, Anon81475885’s guide still works, so follow it here: Guide: Xfce global dark mode in Qubes 4.0 / 4.1

  2. If your Dom0 taskbar/panel seems inexplicably immune to the changes impacting the rest of your Dom0 UI its probably because you didn’t have “save session for future logins” ticked as you logout/restart/shutdown. (So if you’ve previously disabled this via “session and startup” that’s why it isn’t working.) You only need to tick “save session for future logins” once after your change, you can untick it afterwards if you don’t like letting your session save.

Fedora 36 minimal

Changes in Fedora 36 seemingly broke most of the tricks in Anon81475885’s guide so we have to go rogue at this point.

  1. Open a terminal in your AppVM and type:
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme "prefer-dark"
    (That’ll sort out libreoffice, nautilus/files and standard gnome apps like calculator.)

  2. Then create ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and make sure it includes:

[Settings]
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1

(That’ll sort out GTK3 apps like xed )

  1. Open a root terminal in your TemplateVM and type:
    sudo dnf install adwaita-qt5

  2. Then edit your template’s /etc/environment file to include:
    QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=adwaita-dark

(That’ll sort out QT5 apps like qpdfview, but they’ll frequently be missing icons – sorry I don’t have a solution for this yet.)