Flatpak Custom GTK Theme Updater

An Automated Quick Fix for Gnome Users

Jeremy Cheng
2 min readOct 11, 2020

If you found this post useful, chances are, you might also find that every time Flapak gets an update, your custom hack is gone which can be a bit annoying to have to redo everything all over again even though it’s just a few steps. So here’s an automated version of pretty much the same solution to get us by until one day, Flatpak finally finds a better way to seamlessly support custom themes:

https://github.com/hkdb/gnome-ftu

So instead of going through all the steps I covered in my previous post every time, you can now just run this script from day one as well as each time Flatpak receives an update to keep all your Flatpak apps using your custom GTK3 theme effortlessly.

The main difference between this and what was covered in the previous post is that it copies your custom theme into all of the different versions of Gnome runtime directories instead of looking up one app at a time which Gnome runtime directory to copy the theme to. This way, all Flatpak apps will be using your custom theme.

For instructions on how to set this up, head on over to the GitHub repo and take a look at the USAGE section of the of the README.

https://github.com/hkdb/gnome-ftu#usage

Enjoy!

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