gtk2-engines-gtk-qt causes GNOME looks ugly!

[i3dmaster]

ii gtk2-engines-gtk-qt 0.60-1.1ubuntu3 theme engine using Qt for GTK+ 2.x

If you go to KDE->control center->Apperance->GTK styles and fons->choose to use another style (you can pick any GTK style) and apply. No only I couldn't see any improvements on any GTK apps in KDE, but also when you go back to GNOME, your desktop will become very ugly looking. The reason is there is a .gtkrc-2.0 file created under the user's home dir after you do the above changes in KDE and GNOME automatically applies GTK settings in that file. As my opinion, user's home dir is not an appropriate place to put this .gtkrc-2.0 file. I would think some dir under .kde3/.kde would be much better. It took me a quite while to figure it out.

[i3dmaster (i3dmaster-gmail)]

will anyone plan to work on this bug?

[Francois-Denis Gonthier (fdgonthier)]

While it sounded logical that it would be indeed reproducible, I've seen no such behavior in Dapper.

In my KDE, GTK applications are set to use the qt style. I logged into GNOME and the GNOME apps were running fine with the correct style. I think it is because some has gnome-settings-daemon which overrides some things the application would pick up from configuration files.

I'll set Need Infos on this, because I'd like to see more people try to reproduce it in Dapper and/or Breezy.

[Francois-Denis Gonthier (fdgonthier)]

When I wrote "were running fine with the correct style", I meant that the GNOME apps run in GNOME are displayed with the style I've chose in the GNOME configuration.

[magilus (magilus)]

Could it be that this is a dup of #36256?

[Hezekiah Carty (hez)]

I have had this problem as well, on a fresh Dapper install. The KDE-generated .gtkrc-2.0 is overriding the gnome-settings-daemon gtk style selection.

[tuxo (beat-fasel)]

There are different threads on the Ubuntu forums (http://www.ubuntuforums.org) that cover this bug, e.g.:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=151226&highlight=gtk+qt+theme+kde+gnome
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=148486&highlight=gtk+qt+theme+kde+gnome

[John Dong (jdong)]

I can confirm this on the latest dist-upgraded dapper. Logging in under KDE with the setting "Use my KDE style in GNOME" creates a ~/.gtkrc that reads:
# This file was written by KDE
# You can edit it in the KDE control center, under "GTK Styles and Fonts"

include "/usr/share/themes/Qt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

style "user-font"
{
        font_name="DejaVu Sans 9"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-theme-name="Qt"
gtk-font-name="DejaVu Sans 9"

On subsequent GNOME logins, GNOME also takes on the Qt theme, leading to QT widgets inside GNOME. Deleting this .gtkrc-2.0 file and restarting GNOME yields GNOME widgets in GNOME again, but starting KDE will cause this to happen all over again.

This is a very irritating bug for switching back and forth from KDE. Whether this is fixed through KDE being more careful about placing gtkrc files or gnome-settings-daemon ignoring this file, it's an important fix for Dapper because lots of curious newcomers will install both KDE and GNOME and be clueless as to why KDE scars their GNOME apps.

[Luka Renko (lure)]

Can we workaround this issue in a way that login into KDE would switch to own version of ~/.gtkrc (via symlink or similar) and login into GNOME would use own version of ~/.gtkrc?

That way we could have ~/.gtkrc.gnome and ~/.gtkrc.kde and would just symlink to apporiate one on login. Can we use startup scripts for this or is this already too late in the process?

[tuxo (beat-fasel)]

The workaround proposed by Luka Renko seems to be an elegant and simple workaround indeed! It would be great to keep gtk2-engines-gtk-qt by default in Kubuntu as it allows for a much better integration of GNOME applications under KDE.

Thanks a lot!

[Jonathan Riddell (jr)]

The ~/.gtkrc file for gtk2-engines-gtk-qt should only get copied to the home directory if there isn't an existing ~/.gtkrc file, if that's not the case we should find out why. Maybe gnome doesn't make a ~/.gtkrc file by default.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gtk-qt-engine (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]