OK, so I recently upgraded to Fedora 24. Not so many surprises, but one of them was that suddenly the scrollbars in all Qt applications used a different theme. Most probably not only the scrollbars, but those were strikingly different.

As a background, I'm using MATE Desktop on Fedora, with the TraditionalOk theme and Mist icon set. So normally my desktop looks pretty much like the default Gnome 2 desktop before Fedora 15 (when they decided to drop Gnome 2, because it had been discontinued upstream).

To begin with, Fedora 24 is at the transition point between Qt 4 and Qt 5. For this reason, older applications still use Qt 4, while newer have switched to Qt 5 already. And of course there are some legacy applications like Skype for Linux that are stuck on Qt 4. This is not a problem at all, but it may not be obvious to you (as it wasn't to me before I ran into this problem) that Qt 4 and Qt 5 have totally different configuration systems.

Fixing Qt 4 Appearance

  • Install the qt4-config package and then run qtconfig-qt4.
  • In the default Appearance tab, select GTK+ for GUI Style.
  • Click File - Save. That's it, you're done. Now Qt 4 applications are fixed.

Fixing Qt 5 Appearance

Quoting from the official release notes, Fedora 24 introduces QGnomePlatform, a Qt Platform Theme that aims to take as many of the GNOME settings as possible and apply them directly to Qt applications, thus enabling the Qt applications to fit more consistently into the GNOME Desktop.

So all you have to do is install the qgnomeplatform package and then suddenly all Qt 5 applications will start to look like your GTK theme. They will even use the GTK file dialogs. This is awesome.

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