Taking control of my Desktop

MATE Desktop
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With my subscription to ChatGPT and having done a fresh install of Ubuntu-Mate 24.04.5 LTS I’ve begun filing off some rough edges in my system. Some papercuts if you will…

One of the things that has really irritated is the way that GTK applications tend to lean Gnome instead of leaning towards fitting into the Mate Desktop. One of which was Sound Converter. A basic simple program which converted sound formats one to another. The problem is it was for Gnome not Mate.

Well not any more man…

Screenshot at 2026-10-08 12-01-24
Screenshot at 2026-10-08 12-01-241111×824 178 KB

I’ll be doing this everywhere I can going forward now. There’s no reason to suffer through applications that break my desktop any more when I can just work with ChatGPT or some other LLM to make the application fit in. Don’t theme my apps indeed. :wink:

Wanted to mention it in case it inspires others.

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Are you just modifying the applications GTK widgets or theming or are you completely “rewriting” them?

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According to ChatGPT:

For SoundConverter, we modified its existing GTK 3 interface: replacing the GNOME-style headerbar with a traditional menu and toolbar, using MATE’s window decorations, and respecting the desktop’s theme and dialog preferences. That involves actual interface code changes, beyond just changing colors. The application still uses its original GStreamer conversion backend.

I did some other stuff to force Discord to use the system window bars later after that. I’m sure I’ll do more when I encounter them but so far those are the ones and I’ve been happy with the changes.

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