u/stillaswater1994

These days it's hell to theme your distro. You have to deal with 5 different toolkits: Qt 5,6 and GTK 2,3,4/Libadwaita. Granted, GTK2 and Qt5 are being phased out, but you still occasionally run into apps that use them. And even if we ignore GTK2, that still means you need themes for GTK 3, 4/Libadwaita and Kvantum. It's hard to enough to find themes consistent across all these, let alone ones you would actually like.

In addition, personally I am tired of theming my OS manually. One of the reasons I'm currently using a distro that comes with default Gnome theme and the corresponding adw-gtk3 pre-installed is that all I had to do was set up Kvantum manually with LibAdwaita theme. I don't love Adwaita, but what I love even less is spending hours customizing a newly-installed distro when I already have a lot of setting-up to do.

So, my question is: are there any distros that come with a pre-configured theme that covers all 5 toolkits?

On the last two versions of both Linux Mint and LMDE I've been dealing with this problem, which I can't tell whether it's a bug or my computer is broken. Every now and then a chunk of memory (could be anywhere between 500 MB to 1.5 GB) goes into swap, within 2-3 seconds. When that happens, my system lags like crazy, nearly freezes.

I tried troubleshooting it with ChatGPT, and it mainly gave me advice on how to minimize swappiness and something else, but none of it helped, and tbh I was feeling like ChatGPT was trying to treat the symptoms, not the cause. No matter how much I asked, it couldn't tell me the reason this was happening and kept telling me it's normal. But I don't recall this being the case on my previous installs of Linux Mint or other distros.

There doesn't seem to be any clear pattern for when this happens. I'll give you three examples:

1. a torrent finished downloading
2. Lutris was launched for the first time and began downloading a bunch of stuff related to Proton and Wine
3. YouTube was opened in the browser after being idle for about 20 minutes.

Doing these actions again does not reproduce the issue.

I was wondering whether it might be better to remove swap altogether and whether it would be safe to do so. I have 16 GB of RAM and never reach the limit, usually not even half of it. Why is my computer writing memory into swap? Do I even need swap? Is the slowdown happening because of the rapid writing of memory? Is it normal? I have tons of questions, but I don't trust ChatGPT to answer them.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the dark age of theming it seems. Not only do we have to contend with the unthemeable LibAdwaita, but now Qt has become a problem too. Mint stopped shipping pre-configured qt5ct in version 22, qt6ct is also needed now, but at least as of the latest version of Mint 22.3 you can still install it manually and select the gtk2 style for Qt5 and manually download and build qt6gtk2 and select that for Qt6.

On LMDE7, as I have just discovered, there is no gtk2 style for Qt5. I suppose that only leaves us with Kvantum. So I just set it up and thought I'd share my process here.

First, install all the needed components:

sudo apt install qt5ct qt6ct qt-style-kvantum qt5-style-kvantum qt6-style-kvantum qt-style-kvantum-themes

Then download Mint-Y themes for Kvantum.

Open qt5ct and select Kvantum there. Do the same in qt6ct.

Open Kvantum Manager and install the theme you want from the downloaded folder and its dark variant.

Then create a script (a text file ending with .sh) and put this into it:

#!/bin/bash

CONFIG="$HOME/.config/Kvantum/kvantum.kvconfig"

apply_theme() {
    GTK_THEME=$(gsettings get org.cinnamon.desktop.interface gtk-theme | tr -d "'")

    if echo "$GTK_THEME" | grep -qi "dark"; then
        sed -i 's/^theme=.*/theme=Mint-Y-Dark-Aqua/' "$CONFIG"
    else
        sed -i 's/^theme=.*/theme=Mint-Y-Aqua/' "$CONFIG"
    fi
}

# Apply once on startup
apply_theme

# Watch for changes
gsettings monitor org.cinnamon.desktop.interface gtk-theme | while read -r line; do
    apply_theme
done

Make the script executable by going into the properties of the file, under permissions tab check "allow executing as a program".

Make the script launch on startup:

Startup Applications -> + -> Custom Command -> Browse -> select your script.

Log out and log in.

Now, whenever you switch to a dark theme, Kvantum will also switch to a dark theme. There are two downsides though:

1. You need to relaunch already-running Qt apps to apply the theme
2. Obviously this will only work with the theme you put into the script. Which means, you can no longer easily switch between different accent colors and expect Qt apps to respect it.

But it's either this or having to tolerate Fusion on all Qt apps.

I'm 31 years old, and in my life I haven't read a lot of books. If I had to estimate, probably less than 20 actual novel-sized books. With short stories it's much more, but still probably a very tiny amount compared to most people.

In recent years I've been trying to fix that by doing audiobooks, but I often find myself procrastinating just choosing an audiobook to listen to. Most books that I try, I abandon after about an hour. Some I think are somewhat interesting, and they end up becoming a burden because I don't actually wanna go through with them, but I also don't want to drop them because I know there's some interesting stuff there, and I have a FOMO.

There are some books that I truly fall in love with, but they are extremely rare. So every time I have the time to read or listen to a book, I know that there's like 80% chance that for the next hour I'll be suffering.

And yes, I know some people believe you have to push through the early boredom to really get into the book. But with the few books I actually tried that, that was never the case. I'd just end up torturing myself for like 6-8 hours.

I've always wanted to be an intellectual, but I feel like my limited intelligence will always prevent me from being one. I've put in so much effort into bettering myself intellectually, but I still can feel the limits of my intelligence, it's like I'm trying to break through a ceiling. I'm even struggling to express myself right now. And being unable to read books only exacerbates this problem. I really wish I could just enjoy it the way they enjoy it, but I can't.

One reason I love Firefox forks is because you can log into them with your Firefox account and sync the data. And then if one day you decide to ditch that browser and switch to another Firefox fork or indeed back to Firefox itself, you can do so without losing anything.

I don't know whether this is an intended feature or simply something overlooked, but I truly hope this will never get "fixed". I can even send tabs from my mobile Firefox to my desktop Waterfox or Floorp and vice versa, this is so convenient. And I love how similarly all these browsers function, meaning I don't have to relearn everything. I always change some settings in about:config and userChrome.css, and it always works with every fork I've ever tried. And this is something you can't do with Chromium or any of its forks.