Steam tray doesn't use standard theme in gnome shell.
The Steam client just creates the menu using regular GTK calls, it doesn't do anything with theming. I believe what you're seeing are window manager differences.
Yes it is a bit strange. My tray icon looks totally native in KDE (Qt) just by using the oxygen-gtk theme and using it for every GTK application.
I definitely see this in GNOME Shell with Steam, but not with other GTK applications that use the tray (EG: Update Manager). It seems to be hitting a fallback somewhere.
mine seems good, using custom theme(Greybird) in Fedora 18
I have the same problem with Gnome-Shell 3.6, Archlinux x86_64 and Adwaita gtk theme. With another theme steam trayicon looks fine.
It seems like Steam is statically linked to some older version of gtk2 libs that are incompatible with Gnome's latest Adwaita theme due to the lack of support for the "direction" attrubute. Steam throws the following error in console,
(steam:5065): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:1137: error: unexpected identifier direction', expected character}'
And thus it falls back to that ugly default theme. It appears to be picking up another themes which don't use this attribute.
There is a workaround for this problem - AppIndicator Support extension ( https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/ ). This extension adds Ubuntu AppIndicators support to Gnome Shell. Here is a screenshot:
same problem here on debian jessie.
Is there any chance Steam will be linked against a newer version of gtk2 (according to rtsurik's comment). This let Steam looks very unpolished for those who don't want to change their GTK-themes because of the Steam client / who are using default GNOME 3.
Update: For some reason, i don't know why, it's working on my Fedora 25.
AppIndicator's upstream development stagnated around the time Ubuntu 12.10 rolled out, making this effectively a feature request to replace it with something that supports theming.
If that's the issue in this, why don't you just make the popup using the steam UI's design language instead of trying to make it support system theming? It would solve the problem of requiring too much work to reasonably implement while at the same solving the problem of making it seem very unpolished.
@justinkterry +1
Nothing extracted yet.
Steam tray doesn't use standard theme (Adwaita in my case) in gnome shell. For example, here are screenshots of Steam tray options made in Unity and Gnome Shell:
![2013-02-10-203107_1680x1050_scrot]()
![2013-02-10-203301_1680x1050_scrot]()
GTK theme is the same in both cases (Adwaita).
System: Ubuntu 12.10 x64, Gnome Shell 3.6, Nvidia GeForce GT440, proprietary driver version - 310.14. Steam and OS are fully updated.