I’m wondering if it’s possible to change the login screen theme for Gnome 40’s GDM? Now I don’t mean changing the wallpaper background, I mean the actual theme when you first turn on the computer before you login. You see, it defaults to Gnome Adwaita’s theme before I login. Once I login, then Gnome and Gnomes lockscreen will use my theme which is the Yaru theme. But I’m wondering if anyone knows if I can edit or move any files around so that the login screen uses my Yaru theme instead of the default Adwaita theme?
Below is the Adwaita theme that I want to replace from the login screen before my user signs in. I know it’s not a simple edit from the Settings manager so that’s why I come here to see if anyone knows. I know once I login, Gnome will use my preferred themes lock screen theme and what not, but like I said I’m trying to ask if there’s a way to make Gnome use my preferred them from first boot. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!
Just for a slight reference, here is when I’ve logged in, having the Yaru theme and this is how my lock screen looks, ideally how I want the login screen to look on boot, minus the blurred background of course:
On the same page @joekamprad mentioned is a link to a former GDM login theme manager called loginized
The first chapter in the readme of loginized is a disclaimer which contains the information that from Gnome 3.36 “some or even all of the functionality might not work as expected”.
I myself tried several times to customize GDM and failed. In the end I changed to lightdm where you can change the greeter a lot more than in GDM.
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LightDM
especially https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LightDM#Changing_background_images/colors
the archwiki way is working but indeed very complicated the only thing not working is that you can not put background-size: **[WIDTH]**px **[HEIGHT]**px; in the CSS file simple remove / not copy that line and it will work and in the gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml is a file not existing you can replace the filename <file>dash-placeholder.svg</file> to an existing svg file in the extracted theme folder <file>gnome-shell-start.svg</file> and it will work …
Just a quick interjection, and I’ll let you get back to your GNOME talk…
Did you know that you can easily configure virtually every aspect of KDE Plasma, including the appearance of SDDM, its display manager? No additional plugins which break on every update. And all of that with a smaller memory and CPU footprint!
While it’s not hard to change in KDE or xfce, I’d recommend not doing this with GNOME, it’s the most fragile of the DE’s for customization. The more you tinker, the higher likelihood of breaking something along the way.
Ugh, now you got me questioning my entire existence right before I’m about to install Gnome, you got my brain thinking “you know…ya maybe we should give Plasma a go instead”
Edit: thanks for all the replies everyone, looks like it’s not a simple, quick, or easy solution to this without possibly breaking something along the way. Guess it might just be best to leave it as is since I’m not experienced enough to know how to handle this if anything were to go wrong, and knowing Gnome updates that could be a high possibility in the future.
Well— in my opinion, it makes the system more personal. I rotate my Wallpaper every 5 min (via a small script) & change the shell & system look every couple of days…Keeps mixing it up & different.
Well for myself I like consistency within my system and the theming. I like having all my flatpaks, regular software applications to all use the same theme and I know when you use Ubuntu or PopOS, etc. for example, their boot login screen uses colors that they have set from their theme, so I know technically it’s possible, but it feels like it’s far more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not a big deal overall, you’re right it is just a screen you barely see, but I was more so curious to see if perhaps anyone had a simple solution to this dilemma. Hope that clears it up a bit, I’m not fussy about it
For me a computer is a tool, so I would be the guy who buys the hammer and uses it the next day on the job. Other people have different uses and different needs. Neither person is wrong, they are just doing what is right for them.
the only thing not working is that you can not put 
for test save me time
