Ubuntu – Installing and activating themes on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit Unity, how to do

cursorgtkiconsthemesunity

There are lots of cursor, icon, window and GTK themes on the web and I downloaded some of them, but I do not know how to figure out if they are compatible with Ubuntu 14.04.1 64-bit Unity? Furthermore, in the beginning I used Ubuntu Tweak Tool to change the cursor, icon, window and GTK themes; however, I noticed that when I changed the cursor theme and hovered the cursor from one window to another its appearance changed. I was able to fix this by running the following command to set the cursor theme after setting it from Ubuntu Tweak Tool. 

sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

The output of the command was as follows: 

$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme
There are 7 choices for the alternative x-cursor-theme (providing /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme).

  Selection    Path                                       Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme     100       auto mode
  1            /etc/X11/cursors/core.theme                 30        manual mode
  2            /etc/X11/cursors/handhelds.theme            20        manual mode
  3            /etc/X11/cursors/redglass.theme             20        manual mode
  4            /etc/X11/cursors/whiteglass.theme           20        manual mode
  5            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme     30        manual mode
  6            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme     100       manual mode
* 7            /usr/share/icons/mac-cursors/cursor.theme   90        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

And this made me wonder where to put the cursor themes, why the priority of each one is different and what the manual vs. auto mode standed for. Moreover, I was not sure where to put the GTK or icon theme files and I preferred to put them under ~/.icons and I also have an unhidden ~/icons directory containing tar.gz versions of various themes together with a themes directory (also containing themes in tar.gz format) in my home folder. I do not remember as of now if I put them myself or the system created them. I would be grateful and appreciate it if someone could explain how update-alternatives work and where are the various themes stored usually? Also in my opinion Ubuntu Tweak Tool is not that successful at changing themes, is there an alternative for that?

Best Answer

To install a new theme it would suffice to copy it to ~/.local/share/themes, and activate it using Unity Tweak Tool. Running update-alternatives won't be necessary.

Some themes are available via PPAs. Numix for example.

PPAs usually install them in /usr/share/themes and /usr/share/icons/, so it seems to me that your ~/icons folder is one created by yourself

Furthermore .$HOME/themes and $HOME/icons paths are deprecated and will not be read in future releases.

Related Question