Fedora Workstation 39 Planning To Drop Custom Qt Theming

Fedora Workstation has long maintained the QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt projects for applying a GNOME/GTK-like interface and styling to Qt applications in order to enhance the experience. However, to reduce the maintenance burden and the ongoing technical debt, Fedora Workstation 39 is planning to eliminate the custom Qt theming and just rely on Qt upstream.

Jan Grulich of Red Hat laid out plans to eliminate the custom Qt theming of Fedora Workstation. Instead the plan is to more closely track upstream Qt defaults. QGnomePlatfrom and Adqaita-qt will be dropped from Fedora Workstation along with associated custom patches to Qt. Fedora developers do plan to try to upstream some portions of the QGnomePlatform code into upstream Qt.

Jan shows off the updated appearance of the Qt6-based Wireshark on Fedora.

The change is laid out via this Fedora Wiki page. Jan Grulich also wrote a blog post outlining the planned work around Q theming in Fedora Workstation. This includes working on QAdwaitaDecorations itself for Fedora 39 and back-porting the QGtkTheme improvements from Qt5 to Qt5.