Project Zebra: Upgrade to Debian 13 and switching to Wayland ►
◄ Project Zebra: You just do not matter to this whale, it's freeing
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title reference: I Dream of Jeannie. Sort of. And now a woodpecker with a thocky TLK keyboard, apparently. Which seems coded in more ways than one, n'est pas?
I'm not overly bothered by all apps on a system not sharing a toolkit or layout, but (like most people, I'd guess) I do want consistency in fundamentals such as open/save dialogs, to make sure muscle memory doesn't pick the wrong option, and under Plasma 5 I went with the GTK layout of the action button being on the right - i.e. cancel/okay, using qt5ct to set it. So I tried qt6ct as an equivalent of qt5ct but after a bit of trial and error have to agree with this that "If you are running KDE Plasma then you should not have qt5ct or qt6ct installed; these packages conflict with plasma-integration"... I think they're intended for other environments such as Xfce that don't have the Plasma settings app, basically. So I uninstalled them, and ran 'QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE=org.kde.desktop systemsettings' to go and fix settings. Then removed the QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME line from ~/.profile as it was set to qt5ct - a restart later, things seem normal.
As this notes, for older GTK applications, ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and gtk-alternative-button-order=1 should match the Windows and Qt default order, and I've stuck it in the 4.0 equivalent too for what it's worth.
Debian 13 clearly updates GTK and other things, and default GTK open/save file browsers have really been messed around with, putting cancel at the top left in a headerbar, removing the path bar on initial open and not implementing bookmarks, because GTK/Gnome devs are a special breed. Much has been written about this.
Based on some suggestions seen, I added to ~/.profile
export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1
export GDK_DEBUG=portals
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE
And after a restart, I'm not sure what that may have done, but it didn't fix Geany. The version in the Debian Trixie repo is 2.0 so it could have been fixed more recently to honour settings, based on some Github issues raising it. The issue definitely also still exists with Deadbeef but there's a file tree browser plugin in that, so I never see it. In other GTK applications (including some with headerbars like Meld) the KDE file picker is being used, presumably following portal settings.
Explicitly launching with GTK_USE_PORTAL does nothing and GTK_DEBUG logs the error: (geany:3696): Gtk-WARNING **: 12:15:52.575: GTK_DEBUG set but ignored because gtk isn't built with G_ENABLE_DEBUG
As I normally type most things into an editor, I looked for other workarounds. But the Geany AppImage mentioned on the official site (current and previous version tested) crashes when trying to open dialogs, and I don't have anything installed for Flatpak or Snap. I checked other versions from here using 'sudo dpkg -i' to install the common then app .deb for 2.1 still has the GTK file picker, as does using the older 1.38, so it's picking up what's on the system.
Long story short, this has wasted enough time and it obviously isn't an issue with Qt apps. So I'm currently trying Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor, a classic recursive acronym) as an alternative. I've set up a saved session for the ability to reopen files, plus a slightly edited Breeze Light colour scheme to match the Gedit theme in Geany (teal, lilac and magenta for HTML, darker background for the current line) and Noto Mono as the editor font. Auto completion is off, as are most things that get in the way of a simple well-featured editor.
I was a bit concerned about accessibility, given its default of find/replace being a bar at the bottom (I'm broken and my neck doesn't get on with tilting down) which seems to have been an issue for years. But I'm remembering now, Kate has multiple implementations of search & replace, simple standard ones plus a more advanced tool that can be resized and moved. I've changed its pane shortcut to Ctrl+Shift+R.
Bonus history link for anyone interested in old operating systems:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/
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