Xfce Forum

uibits

Member

Registered: 2022-07-02

Posts: 39

[SOLVED] VLC dark theme no longer working

Since updating Manjaro Xfce it would seem that something has been broken. Setting vlc media player's Force window style option to qt5ct-style in the Preferences no longer works, which I used as a dark theme. The vlc interface doesn't change at all, and when I exit and start vlc again the setting returns to Fusion which is a light(?) theme. Attempting to select some other Force window style options eg. bb10barkresults in buggy super large buttons and the title bar menu loses all spacing between menu items.

I don't know if this should be move to General discussion as I'm not an expert on themes and maybe this is not related to anything Xfce, but seeing as folk were  able to point me to a fix re a theme issue recently in these forums, maybe they will know how to fix this vlc media player issue.

Thanks

Last edited by uibits (2024-08-26 17:30:47)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,482

Re: [SOLVED] VLC dark theme no longer working

I doubt this is an Xfce issue, but rather a vlc or gtk/qt issue. That being said, does this link help?

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gogogadget

Member

Registered: 2023-03-19

Posts: 28

Re: [SOLVED] VLC dark theme no longer working

Run qt5ct in a terminal and check what theme is used, if it's the right one, reinstall qt5-styleplugins package, it's sometime needed.

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uibits

Member

Registered: 2022-07-02

Posts: 39

Re: [SOLVED] VLC dark theme no longer working

Thanks ToZ and gogogadget!

I have been quietly trying to get to the bottom of it. There is something mildly unstable when it comes to themes, just tickering with the order of selecting themes in VLC media player, revealed the 'qt5ct-style' today, but that didn't help get dark theme.

I tried 2 things which made it difficult to know what did what:

$ # (1) gtk-4.0 enabling??
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/gtk-4.0/
$ ln -sf /usr/share/themes/Matcha-dark-sea/gtk-4.0/{assets,gtk.css,gtk-dark.css} ~/.config/gtk-4.0/

and this...

(2) ToZ i tried that link you suggested here (non-cloudflare link). I tried in step 2 of 3, in 'Kvantum', which is already installed in Manjaro, setting a dark theme there. The theme seemed to work perfectly in this Kvantum tester application. However the instuctions said I may need to wait until I login for the settings to take effect,

At this time I noticed the symlink mouse emblem issue magically was solved. Today i learn it was from (1) above.

*EVENTUALLY RESTARTS PC*

Now there are a other things dialog popup boxes are suddenly dark (i didn't really want that) and many other applications were dark, BUT not vlc media player. I Remove the (1) above, because it didn't solve the issue.

*RESTARTS PC AGAIN*

Now other applications and dialogs are light, BUT the symlink mouse emblem is broken.

NOW i try gogogadget's suggestion with reinstalling 'qt5-styleplugins' (its already installed). BUT both pacman AND pamac complained ...

$ sudo pacman -S qt5-styleplugins
error: target not found: qt5-styleplugins
$ sudo pamac search qt5-styleplugins
qt5-styleplugins  5.0.0.XXXXXXXX-XX [Installed]                                                                                                          
    Additional style plugins for Qt5
$ sudo pamac reinstall qt5-styleplugins
Error: target not found: qt5-styleplugins-5.0.0.XXXXXXXX-XX

I then go back to my notes, during the update that caused the issue:

New optional dependencies for kvantum
    kvantum-qt5: Qt5 style

So I decide to install this and voila, I just had to relaunch vlc and in the Preferences > Interfaces tab, now "Kvantum-dark" is in the list!

So SOLVED

Moral of the story developers change things and can cause them to stop working, as they did with kvantum. Before this whole affair i had no idea kvantum was doing theme magic, but I learned the hard way I guess.

(I'm not fully out of the woods... the symlink mouse emblem in Thunar is now broken and I don't how to get it back without introducing other (dark) side-effects! My overall theme is Matcha-sea, because it has a nice contrast of both light and dark. but if I do the link to gtk4.0 [see (1) above] I end up with dark dialogs boxes)