When it comes to my desktop, I like simplicity. Ubuntu itself, shipping with a completely empty desktop by default, taught me to appreciate cleanness.
In a time where a lot of people is experimenting with dark themes, I found myself doing the exact opposite. More than an how to this is post is just documenting my own choice repect my Gnome theme.
It’s just two steps.
First: get the Unity theme
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extras
Second: hack your theme
- Go into System->Preferences->Appearance
- Select Human Theme (if it’s not already selected)
- Select the Customize tab, then Window Border and choose the Unity item.
- Select the Colors tab, and change the windows background to white (FFFFFF)
If you done everything correctly, you should be done. Don’t forget to save your theme (I called mine Milky Unity, but you can choose any name you want).
Now you should have a completely white theme, with no distinction between the window title and the menus, and the default Ubuntu colors and icons.
Here’s how the terminal will look like:
How applications tabs appear:
I also slightly tweaked Firefox (how-to here), here’s a shot.
(the pic also shows how the out of focus windows appear)
While some people find all white can be tiring for the eyes, I don’t really agree:
- Most of webpages are white. So you’ll get tired anyway.
- And by the way, the vast majority of themes, have white document areas, and that’s where you focus your eyes all the time, not windows titles and toolbars.
- If you get tired, just reduce the brightness of your display FTW.
Further tweaking:
- try the Tangerine icon theme. It’s quite similar to the human, but with its own style
- see my tip to get big and auto-hiding panels. It matchs nicely with the theme.
- Also Droid fonts look awesome on this theme. As simple as an apt-get.
Let me know if you like it or completely detest it.
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I really loved your Firefox tweaking. In fact I was trying to figure out how to do that before reading your post. I feel that top menu bar in firefox is totally unnecessary.
when i try “sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extra”
i get E: Couldn’t find package gnome-themes-extra
i am using 8.10, any ideas?
@das: sure! Check you have the “Universe” repository enabled. Go in System->Administration->Software Sources and make sure that the second entry “universe” is activated ! Then reload the repositories (if it doesn’t do automatically is as simple as sudo apt-get update) and try again !
yeah, universe is already checked, did that a long time ago, and i just made sure, any other ideas?
@das:Sure, you can blame me for writing sucky tutorials. And just hit ‘tab’ some more time when your unsure about the package name being right.
wrong:
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extra
right (try this one):
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extras
Correcting the post, thank you very much
oh nice tip i had no idea u could use tab to autocomplete in terminal, Sweet
Interesting – but have you tried ‘blue carbon’ (small borders – and it’s not a very dark or bright theme – easy on the eyes) Red carbon is nice, but these themes need the colours tweaking – or they’re a little too dark/bright/saturated . Blue carbon is is great for editing (GIMP or Ardour) because generally I get stressed eyes with a full bright screen for these jobs.
Sunday is lovely – not blue mac style theme (metal 0.6.1 is a blue version) with matching ‘sunday’ emerald borders.
See other examples of desktops over at linuxoutlaws.com – there’s a desktop thread where podcast listeners post their desktops.