On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 11:33 PM David C Rankin <[email protected]> wrote: > > All, > > On first start of Firefox 151, the general theme (tab bar, url bar, > etc..) change from Dark to Light theme color. The setting for theme in > Firefox was set to Auto, as it had always been. To restore the dark > theme, I had to affirmatively select the Dark theme in settings. The > desktop is fluxbox. Firefox has always presented a dark theme there. > > No changes were made to the desktop or desktop theme. Does anyone > know why Firefox would suddenly switch from using Dark to Light theme > with the setting for theme in Firefox set to Auto? > > Is it the xdg-desktop-portal package? E.g., > > Required By : xdg-desktop-portal-gtk > Optional For : firefox > > As a test I tried removing xdg-desktop-portal, but it fails > dependency checks now: > > checking dependencies... > error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) > :: removing xdg-desktop-portal breaks dependency 'xdg-desktop-portal' > required by xdg-desktop-portal-gtk > > > As of 4/20/2026, I had no xdg-desktop-portal on my system as I was > comparing openSUSE and Arch checking an > GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidArgs bug thrown by > python/matplotlib on openSUSE. > > See: > https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/6H3CQ7ONDEML52VHSOOFEL55THLNPUUP/ > > So is the requirement for xdg-desktop-portal install new on Arch, and > was it intended as a hard dependency on all desktops, even the old ones > like fluxbox? If so, was this what changed the Firefox theme from Dark > to Light with Auto set? > > I have no need for xdg-desktop-portal, and don't really want it. If > it's the problem, it's inclusion as a hard dependency seems contrary to > the KISS philosophy of Arch? > > What say the experts?
GTK 4.22 considers portals a platform API for Linux and depends on their functionality (see, e.g. upstream commit 44e6907d9b8a). To ensure basic portals are always present I added a dependency on xdg-desktop-portal-gtk to gtk4 (see issues gtk4#14 and gtk4#18). Firefox will load the org.freedesktop.appearance.color-scheme setting from the Settings portal if it is available. If the GTK implementation is serving this portal, it looks up the color-scheme key in the org.gnome.desktop.interface schema. You can set this one to prefer-dark using: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-dark
