Public bug reported:
Description:
On Ubuntu 24.04, toggling the Appearance style to "Dark" in GNOME Settings
fails to apply to core GTK4/libadwaita applications (such as
gnome-control-center and nautilus). The windows remain stuck in light mode,
even though third-party apps (like Google Chrome) correctly detect and apply
the dark theme.
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open GNOME Settings -> Appearance.
2.Select the "Dark" style.
3.Observe that the Settings window and Nautilus do not change and remain in
light mode.
Diagnostics Performed:
System-wide issue: The issue persists on a newly created, entirely clean
user account, ruling out corrupted local configurations or GNOME
extensions.
Portal Status: xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome are
installed, active, and running without errors in systemd.
D-Bus Broadcast is Correct: Queried the portal directly via D-Bus to see if the
system was broadcasting the theme correctly using the following command:
gdbus call --session --dest org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop --object-path
/org/freedesktop/portal/desktop --method org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read
'org.freedesktop.appearance' 'color-scheme'
This correctly returned (<<uint32 1>>,), confirming the portal is successfully
reading the setting and broadcasting Dark Mode.
The Workaround:
Setting the environment variable ADW_DISABLE_PORTAL=1 (via
~/.config/environment.d/adwaita.conf) and rebooting immediately resolves the
issue. Core apps instantly respect the dark theme.
Conclusion:
Because bypassing the portal fixes the rendering, this indicates that
libadwaita's internal portal-listener in this build is either failing to read
or entirely ignoring the correct color-scheme D-Bus signal being broadcasted by
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 24.04
Package: libadwaita-1-0 1.5.0-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.17.0-14.14~24.04.1-generic 6.17.9
Uname: Linux 6.17.0-14-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.28.1-0ubuntu3.8
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Mar 2 00:40:56 2026
InstallationDate: Installed on 2025-12-26 (65 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS "Noble Numbat" - Release amd64
(20250805.1)
ProcEnviron:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
PATH=(custom, no user)
SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
TERM=xterm-256color
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
SourcePackage: libadwaita-1
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
** Affects: libadwaita-1 (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: amd64 apport-bug noble
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2143006
Title:
libadwaita apps stuck in light mode; ignoring xdg-desktop-portal in
24.04
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