What Is The Best GNOME Desktop Theme?

By | 2010/01/22
19 Comments

What is the best GNOME Desktop theme?

I’ve been using the Shiki theme (Shiki-Brave) for some time now. You may recall that I wrote about it in My Ubuntu Look and Feel as well as How To Install Shiki-Colors Theme in Ubuntu. After seeing some recent posts on other blogs regarding some of the potential themes for Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid”, I’ve got the urge to try something new.

So, I this is my question for all of you readers out there, and don’t be shy about linking to screenshots:

19 thoughts on “What Is The Best GNOME Desktop Theme?”

  4. bruno

    Although preferring Gnome to KDE, I don’t seem to like the out-of-the-box look of it. Installing droid font helps but it still looks too 90’s. The themes try but without transparency they don’t take anywhere, specially the dark ones. So the answer to me is Compiz: enable it on your desktop and you get a whole new and beautiful desktop, whatever the theme you use.

  6. Jay

    I currently use some variant of Shiki, but one thing that drives me crazy about it is that the Maximize button remains a plus sign when the window is maximized. I wouldn’t know how to indicate “Restore” in a way that matches the simple geometrics of Shiki’s window buttons, but a plus sign is not it. Of course I know what it means, so I don’t have any trouble with it other than that it’s not “correct,” although recently a friend was using my computer and was unable to figure out how to restore a maximized window.

    The problem with themes like Elementary and (Night) Impression is that their buttons have no indication of what they do. I haven’t installed either of them, so I would hope that at the very least some indicators are revealed when you hover over them. But that is a useless and confusing design gimmick.

    Mira is one I’d never heard of, but as is so often the case with GNOME themes, it sacrifices usability for style.

    In my opinion there are no good GNOME themes. Not one. Every theme is either under- or over-designed, or is an attempt to mimic some other OS. The under-designed ones can be functional but look awful, as though they were designed more than a decade ago. And the over-designed ones are too specific to a single person’s taste to really ever find traction among more than a small percentage of all GNOME users — and in the worst cases, they’re bulky, illegible, and have the unmistakable sound of bad techno seeping out of them. And, invariably, scantily-clad anime characters as wallpaper in the screenshots.

    I’ve been dying for someone to come up with the first decent GNOME theme ever to be released. I’ve spent hours scouring gnome-look.org. You’d think some talented but underappreciated designer would see this problem as a unique opportunity to floor everyone and demonstrate his chops. But I don’t feel like that’s going to happen any time soon.

  8. precipitous

    The default Ubuntu Studio theme is still the best one I have found…

  9. Matteo

    The best? For me is the Human Theme, the default theme in ubuntu!

  13. Johonunu

    I love elementary theme ! The best : ) Icons too : )

  14. Shawn Thompson

    i like elementary with one tweak. i switch the close, max, min buttons to the left. with the exception of chrome, it’s nice.

  17. evelyn gallagher

    I would like to know how to set up a screen saver that counts down the days to an event.

    I want to enter the date of an event and have the days remaining before that event to automatically update and be reflected each day.

    I know people who have done this as far back as 15 years ago but it was done with Windows, I’m sure Ubuntu must have it’s own version but I can’t figure it out.

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