Maybe a silly question, but ...

[Richard Cole <rjcole tempus int gu edu au>]

I run gnome on my desktop and on my laptop but with different
themes. Today I ran "the gimp" on my laptop but was connected from my
desktop. So my X-server was running on my desktop machine. All pretty
straight forward except that the gimp used the theme from my laptop
rather than the theme from my X-display (running on the desktop machine).

Shouldn't the gnome theme stuff in client apps like "the gimp" --- and
here I confess my total ignorance of the code and the design --- find
out what theme is running on the display rather than what theme is
selected in the home directory of the user.

And while I've got your attention are the gnome themes totally based on
pixmaps or do they contain some executable component. If they had some
executable component like in Qt then Gnome stuff attached to the
display couldn't send a copy of the theme to the client. It could
simply name the theme and rely on it being installed on the client
system.

with regards,

Richard Cole.
(r cole gu edu au)