[Bug]: nativeTheme.shouldUseDarkColors not working on linux

[makerio90]

Preflight Checklist

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines for this project.
• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct that this project adheres to.
• I have searched the issue tracker for a feature request that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Electron Version

12.0.0

What operating system are you using?

Ubuntu

Operating System Version

20.04

What arch are you using?

x64

Last Known Working Electron version

No response

Expected Behavior

returning true (i use dark mode)

Actual Behavior

returning false, regardless of color scheme.

Testcase Gist URL

No response

Additional Information

No response

[Nokel81]

I have run into this as well on electron@14.2.9

[Hubro]

This is probably my biggest annoyance in my day to day life. I have pretty much every application following my system wide dark mode preference at this point, except my browser and all my Electron applications, which is like half of my applications.

Is this something Electron won't support before Chromium supports it natively? I feel like that could take a long time.

It would be amazing if Electron could implement support for the (now standardized) Freedesktop system-wide dark mode preference:

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data/org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Settings.xml#L34

It doesn't seem like it would be a lot of effort. The logic would basically be:

• If running on Linux
• If "org.freedesktop.appearance.color-scheme" is available (dbus)
• Then use the value of "color-scheme"
• Listen for changes to the value and re-apply above logic

Just among the applications I use every day, this would add automatic light/dark theme switching to:

• Discord
• Obsidian
• Slack
• VSCode

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale. If this issue is still affecting you, please leave any comment (for example, "bump"), and we'll keep it open. If you have any new additional information—in particular, if this is still reproducible in the latest version of Electron or in the beta—please include it with your comment!

[Nokel81]

This is certainly still an issue

[makerio90]

fuck that bot

[dbrgn]

Related issue (newer, but with more technical details): #33635

[Igetin]

Just among the applications I use every day, this would add automatic light/dark theme switching to:

• Discord

Fixing this issue on Electron wouldn’t actually fix the theme sync for Discord, as they use the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query directly instead of Electron APIs. For Discord’s theme sync to work, this Chromium bug needs to be resolved.

[Danik1601]

#33635 (comment)

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale. If this issue is still affecting you, please leave any comment (for example, "bump"), and we'll keep it open. If you have any new additional information—in particular, if this is still reproducible in the latest version of Electron or in the beta—please include it with your comment!

[Igetin]

Still reproducible on Electron 25, see this comment for details.