If you’ve recently installed Ubuntu 25.04 or upgraded from 24.10, you may have observed an inconsistency with the window buttons in GTK applications. A user named Cristiano Fraga G. Nunes noticed that the minimize, maximize, and close buttons appear to be of different sizes across various GTK applications.
Specifically, he highlighted that while GTK4 apps like Nautilus and Text Editor feature smaller window buttons, GTK3 apps such as Terminal retain larger buttons—similar to the sizes seen in Ubuntu 24.10. This discrepancy stems from Ubuntu’s use of the Yaru theme, a customized version of the libadwaita stylesheet. It seems that the theme applies different button sizes between GTK4 and GTK3 applications.
Fortunately, a fix is on the horizon. A patched version of libadwaita has been accepted in the plucky-proposed repository, which will be rolled out to regular repositories as long as it does not introduce further issues. This attention to detail mirrors the previous fixes, like the oversized icon problem addressed earlier in the development cycle of Ubuntu 25.04.