Paper is a new material design inspired GTK theme, which is currently in beta. "Its design is mostly flat with a minimal use of shadows for depth", mentions its website, and it was developed primarily for the GNOME (Shell) and other desktops that make use of header bars.





Ideally, you'll need a complete GNOME 3.14 / 3.12 desktop to see what Paper is all about, since the theme uses custom colors for header bars / client-side decoration apps.

Paper under Ubuntu GNOME 14.10







The theme looks pretty nice with traditional titlebar/menubar/toolbar applications, but it doesn't compare with the experience it offers for header bars apps. Here's a Paper GTK theme screenshot taken under Ubuntu 14.10 with Unity: Unfortunately, Ubuntu 14.10 (screenshot above) ships with GNOME 3.12 by default, mixed with some 3.10 bits and because of that, some applications like Gedit or Calculator don't use header bars, so here's another screenshot, via Paper's website:The theme looks pretty nice with traditional titlebar/menubar/toolbar applications, but it doesn't compare with the experience it offers for header bars apps. Here's a Paper GTK theme screenshot taken under Ubuntu 14.10 with Unity:

And a couple of screenshots to get an idea on how the widgets look like with GTK3 and GTK2:

GTK3

GTK2

It's important to mention that currently, there are a few issues with Paper GTK theme, especially on non-GNOME (Shell) desktops. For instance, the Nemo statusbar is not themed correctly, the Ubuntu Sound Menu buttons are not displayed and probably more (so I don't really recommend it on Unity, at least for now). Also, the GTK2 theme still needs some work. However, the theme was developed with GNOME / header bar apps in mind and furthermore, it's still in beta, so that's understandable.





According to +Sam Hewitt , the theme developer, Paper will be a complete theme suite once it goes stable: the GTK theme will be accompanied by GNOME Shell icon and Plank themes.

Download Paper GTK theme

Ubuntu users can install the latest Paper GTK theme by using its official daily buils PPA (unstable):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snwh/pulp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install paper-gtk-theme

Once installed, use an application such as GNOME Tweak Tool to set the theme to Paper.

If you download the Paper GTK theme tarball, you'll find an "install.sh" script that you can run to install the theme and set it as the current desktop theme however, note that if you run the script as root (that's required if you want to install the theme globally, under /usr/share/themes/), the script can't set the current theme to Paper because gsettings (which the script uses to change the theme) doesn't work as root.

initially seen @ Marco's Box; second screenshot via Paper's website

users can install Paper via AUR