GNOME is cool and beautiful, and the default Adwaita theme has matured greatly since it was introduced in GNOME 3.0. In fact, the Adwaita theme in Fedora 21 is now looking better than ever. However, I have used it for a long time, and I kinda feel like using a different theme — After all, who doesn’t like to have a change once in a while? So, I decided to put new life into my desktop, and my search ended with the great moka project.

Moka started as a single Linux desktop icon theme, but over time it has gradually evolved into an entire project & brand identity that provides quality designs to people. Moka is about personalization and its goal is to provide an assortment of style options to allow you to customize your experience. mokaproject.com

Good design speaks for itself, right? Here it goes:

Prerequisites

Due to the emphasis on simplicity, GNOME 3 doesn’t provide a GUI tool to configure settings like changing the GTK theme, GNOME Shell theme, or icon theme. However, Gnome Tweak Tool, created by John Stowers, does provide these functionalities. We also need a gnome shell extension named User Themes to load shell themes. Install both using the following command:

$ sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool gnome-shell-extension-user-theme -y

Now open up Gnome Tweak Tool. Make sure that “user themes” is switched on in the extensions tab.

Installation

To install moka, first you need to add it’s repository to your system. It can be done with the following command.

$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo http://mokaproject.com/packages/rpm/moka-stable.repo

Lets see what are the packages provided by the Moka project and how can you use them to theme GNOME:

Window & GTK+ Themes: The window theme is applied to the top bar with the application title and controls such as minimize, maximize and close. The GTK+ theme controls other aspects of the window such as the backgrounds for windows and tabs, how an application will look when it is active vs. inactive, buttons, check-boxes, etc. The Orchis GTK Theme is created for this and you can install it using:

$ sudo yum install orchis-gtk-theme -y

Gnome Shell Theme: GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for GNOME, like switching to windows and launching applications. User interface elements provided by GNOME Shell include the Panel at the top of the screen, the Activities Overview, and Message Tray at the bottom of the screen. All these can be styled using a Gnome Shell theme and we use Moka Gnome Shell Theme here:

$ sudo yum install moka-gnome-shell-theme -y

Icon Theme: It is a set of icons that share a common look and feel and all apps use icons from the currently selected theme. Moka Project provides two icon themes named Moka Icon Theme and Faba Icon Theme. Install them using:

$ sudo yum install faba-icon-theme faba-mono-icons moka-icon-theme -y

Once you installed above packages, you can change the themes using Gnome Tweak Tool. Open up Gnome Tweak Tool, go to the appearance tab and set the above themes. You can use the screenshot as a reference.

If you are interested, some beautiful wallpapers are also provided by moka project. You can download it from mokaproject.com/wallpapers/.

The Brains

Moka wouldn’t exist without the dedication of Sam Hewitt who, as Moka’s benevolent dictator (for life), solely designs, develops & maintains the entire project. Sam consumes (too much) coffee & spends countless hours on Moka’s products –obsessing over Moka’s pixel-perfection & responding to all you lovely people. mokaproject.com

It seems moka project is named after Moka coffee pot, due to his coffee addiction 😉 So, if you like the icon set and the theme, be sure to show him some love. It will help him to keep fresh coffee inside his moka pot.