How to enable dark mode in Varia Downloader?

[blacxsnow]

Greetings,
I’m using Varia as a Flatpak on Fedora Workstation with i3 WM and Ly as the display manager (GDM disabled). My system GTK/Qt apps use dark themes correctly, but Varia still launches in light mode.

I tried:
flatpak override --user
--env=GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark
io.github.giantpinkrobots.varia

and confirmed inside the sandbox:
echo $GTK_THEME

Output:
Adwaita:dark

I also installed the dark GTK runtime:
flatpak install flathub org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Adwaita-dark

Moreover,

• xdg-desktop-portal currently fails to start in this setup
• graphical-session.target is inactive
• DESKTOP_SESSION and XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP are mostly unset under Ly/i3

So I’m unsure whether this is:

• a Flatpak/libadwaita portal issue related to Ly+i3
• or an app-side limitation in Varia itself

Is there a proper way to force dark mode for Varia in this environment?
Thanks.

[giantpinkrobots]

You shouldn't override the GTK_THEME variable here. You installing Gtk3theme.Adwaita-dark is also ineffective as Varia uses GTK4/Libadwaita. These apps check for the xdg-desktop-portal's color-scheme setting, so it failing to start on your system is your issue. You need to get that working, and remove the GTK_THEME override.