I installed i3, most apps correctly do dark mode, a few don’t, so I set dark mode on a per-app basis in these. But now I am wondering, why is light mode the default? I encountered the same in Librewolf where I had to disable RFP to use dark mode.
So this is a poll, do you use light or dark mode?
Currently using Dark Mode so that’s what I voted. I switch between them when I get bored though.
I’m not using i3. I like both dark and light themes and switch between them using KDE Plasma’s day/night feature. If you add a “both” option to the poll, I’ll vote for that.
I guess it is reflecting the fact that most (especially older) books have black text on white paper. At that time many argued that was the “best” way for the eyes. And looked better than before in old terminals. As you probably know, old terminals (before windowing systems) had typically white (or green) text on black background in order to technological reasons (like saving the screen etc.).
Anyways, nowadays I prefer the dark mode, and wish many more web sites would support it too. There still are many sites that don’t.
Visually impaired. Dark, high contrast where needed. I stick with Plasma as I can build custom themes based on how my vision is on any given day. I’m not aware of any other OS/DE that can do that.
Light mode is the default purely because of history.
As a side note, light mode is still needed because of people with visual impairments. Depending on the nature of your impairment, having light mode may cause you issues or having dark mode may cause you issues so both are important to have.
for me there can only be ONE 
I find light mode usable only in very, very well ligth room or under direct sunlight - which is rarely the case for my computer. The other use case it on my work machine with Windows because their dark mode is just black. But all the lines and table separators are also black so most gui apps just blend together and become difficult to navigate.
I don’t use I3. But I usually use dark mode on my desktops.
The cases I absolutely need to use light mode are very rare. Mostly it happens at work when sun shines directly at the laptop screen, making the UI illegible, also dark mode in Windows is very badly implemented, having most Win32 apps with no dark mode support.
All my Linux-powered machines (incl. smartphone[1]) use dark mode with absolutely no excuses.
I hope Android counts as for being powered by Linux kernel ↩︎
I started my software engineering studies with old terminals having green text on black background (connected to Soviet copy-pastes of PDP-11 and IBM-370), and did I dislike these terminals… So, when dark mode became the rage, it took me quite some time to adapt to it. Now, it’s mostly light mode at day, dark mode at night.
Both light and dark modes have advantages depending on lighting in the room where your monitor is. I prefer a background light range that is neutral in nature. . . . Not too dark and not too bright. Something in between that also utilizes colors that are pleasing for the eyes to view. The screen brightness control in plasma is helpful also when adjusting to times between light and darkness based on time zones, sunrise and sunset.
Rich ;
Um… both?
I’ve got cataracts, so some minor visual impairment (just wait kids, it’s gonna happen to you!) and I much prefer web pages with dark text on light backgrounds. My eyes see the contrast better. When I click on a web page and it pops up some skript-kiddie-edgelord dark theme, I quickly scan for the “light” button to turn that crap off. My overall sway theme is Arc-Lighter for the same reason.
But when I’m messing around in Neovim, I set the background to be #000000 and use a theme with a decent amount of contrast between the common elements. Soothing pastoral pastels? Clown school neons? Fsck that shizz. I gotta see, man!
I’ve settled on #181818 for my dark level, - I don’t know what it is about that specific tone, but I get better contrast out of it. Eyes are weird..!
I’m using dark mode wherever I can … 
on a shiny day lightmode is good and in the dark nights all went dark .. in addition there is also nighmode changing colors at late night for better sleep.
I use dark mode and I always have night mode on for better eye health. I used f.lux on windows and using the default night light stuff in plasma now
There are two kinds of people in the world:
I use this chrome extension, and now every website is dark to me. I can manually set some websites to remain in light mode too, and the extension remembers it in the browser.
