The GNOME desktop environment and its underlying Gtk+ widget toolkit—which provide a user interface and a standard set of applications for Linux—have an elaborate theme system that enables users to customize the appearance of their desktop.

GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. Many custom GNOME themes are published in online galleries so that they can be downloaded and installed by regular end users. The most popular of these repositories is the GNOME-Look.org website, which has become the de facto standard home of downloadable GNOME theming content.

Although a wide variety of custom widget and window styles are available, it can be challenging to find the ones that are truly elegant amid the overwhelming volume of garish eyesores. In this article we will look at a selection of some of the best themes for the GNOME environment. Some of them are community-driven efforts and some of them come from well-known Linux distributions.

Sonar





The Sonar theme for GNOME was created by Novell and introduced in version 11.2 of openSUSE. Its Gtk+ style has soft gradients that mix green and gray. The window border and titlebar are a combined black, with a green radial gradient at the top that looks a bit like floodlighting. The Sonar icons conform with the basic tango style, but have a bit more detail and more elaborate shading. The distinctive Sonar folder icons are especially beautiful.

Elementary





The Elementary project originally began as an icon collection, but its mandate has expanded considerably. The designers aim to holistically refine the desktop experience, boosting both usability and aesthetic appeal. Elementary's exquisite icons take the Tango style to a whole new level and exude a degree of professionalism and refinement that is seldom found in open source art.

Shiki and GNOME Colors





Shiki is a Gtk+ theme that is designed to deliver some of the stylistic elegance of a dark theme without compromising usability. There are seven different variants of Shiki, each with highlighting in a different color. There is also a set of matching icon themes called GNOME Colors and set of matching login themes called Arc Colors. The three original variants are Brave (blue), Wine (red), and Wise (green). The icons have a lot of visual similarities to Elementary, but with more pronounced coloring.

Dust





Dust is a dark brown theme that was originally designed by several Ubuntu community members as a conceptual replacement for Ubuntu's classic Human theme. It has a distinctly modern appearance and uses strong gradients throughout. It works very well with Ubuntu's native Humanity icon theme or with the GNOME Colors Dust variant.

Nimbus





When Sun launched its OpenSolaris project with the aim of making a desktop-centric distribution, the company decided to grace it with a GNOME theme that matched the look and feel of Swing's Nimbus style. The result is impressive. The glossy gradients in the Gtk+ theme give it a touch of aqua flair that is counterbalanced nicely by its subdued palette, which consists of light blues and grays. The icons share a similar appearance and have a glossy liquid texture. It looks smooth, professional, and consistent.

Installing themes

Themes are typically distributed in compressed tar archives. After you download them to your computer, you can install them by clicking the Install button in GNOME's Appearance Preferences dialog and then selecting the relevant archive in the file chooser. This will generally make the theme accessible through the list in the Appearance Preferences dialog. You can also install a theme from the command line by expanding the compressed archive in the ~/.themes directory. Icon themes are placed in the ~/.icons directory.

You can apply a theme by selecting its thumbnail in the Appearance Preferences dialog. The thumbnails are metathemes, which consist of a combination of other theme elements. You can get more control over your theme settings by clicking the Customize button in the dialog. This will let you choose the widget theme and window border theme individually. In some cases, you can also customize the colors that are used in a theme.

Keep in mind that some of the themes described in this article, such as Sonar and Nimbus, are designed for a specific distro and might not work perfectly in other kinds of environments.

If you are using Ubuntu, be sure to check the package archive before you try to install from a tarball. The Shiki themes and GNOME Colors icons are all available directly through APT. For additional themes, I recommend perusing the GNOME-Look.org website.