Following blog post from Patrick Griffis about new themes support in Flatpak, we started working on supporting this new feature too. Currently wherever you start a Qt application, it would always look like a KDE application or something would be missing, like icons so you would end up with bad experience and mixed feelings. This is going to change now as we now support Gnome in form of icons, widget style and Qt platform theme and with this, when you run a Qt application in Gnome, it will look definitely better and more natively than before. We packaged regular adwaita icons which are used by default in Gnome as extension of freedesktop runtime. For widget style we use adwaita-qt style, which is a Qt style attempting to look like Gtk’s adwaita and the most important part putting this all together is QGnomePlatform, a Qt platform theme which reads your Gnome configuration and applies it to running Qt applications. QGnomePlatform also enforces Qt apps to use adwaita icons and adwaita-qt style by default so that’s another reason why it is important. Both adwaita-qt and QGnomePlatform projects are by the way authored by Martin Bříza, a collegue of mine from Red Hat so if you meet him in person somewhere buy him a beer for that he cares about Qt integration in Gnome :). Now coming to a question how to install this and make it work. Basically all you need to do is install following extensions and you shold be done:
flatpak install kderuntime org.freedesktop.Platform.Icontheme.Adwaita flatpak install kderuntime org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita flatpak install kderuntime org.kde.PlatformTheme.QGnomePlatform
Your Qt apps running in flatpak should then automatically pick up all of these extensions without any further modification, same way it does automatically when you run it outside the sandbox. Simply done!. I’m also aware that there are more Gtk themes, like adwaita-dark or high-contrast, both are also available in form of Qt style and we will probably package them later, but at this point it is mostly proof of concept that this can be done and works nicely. You can follow our wiki page if you want more information about runtimes, repository with applications and so on and from me it’s all for now.
Btw. below you can see okular running in flatpak and using adwaita-qt style with adwaita icons.
