Installing themes in Gnome3.4.2 (Debian)?
 

hello, I want to install a Shell theme, can someone help me with that? I'm on Gnome3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy. I downloaded the Cloudy theme from gnome-look.org, it comes as a tar.gz. When I try to select it in gnome tweak tool, it's not available. the file selection dialogue will show only .zip files - the tarball is not available for a choice.

Hi,

Extract the tarball in /usr/share/themes and see if it turns up then in the Gnome Tweak Tool.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you, this works.
Also I found out that extracting the tarball and recompressing it to a .zip file, Gnome Tweak Tool can choose it normally.

I wonder if this limitation is intentional - it seems strange to me that a standard Linux desktop utility would handle .zip files only, if tarballs are so much more common in the *nix world (I think. Don't you?)
What would be the appropriate place to tell the devs of Tweak Tool (not a Bug report I guess)?

customizing themes
 

It seems to me this is closely enough related, so I'm continuing this thread:
A few elements of my current theme don't go together well: I have generally light colors, mostly different shades of beige throughout.
- When an element is highlighted, it is framed in light blue while the font is white, so it's barely readable.
- Also, checkboxes and "selection dots" (are whatever they're called) in e.g. settings dialogues are also white on a light beige background, i.e. hardly visible. Is there a way to change only these specific elements in a theme, i.e. more specifically, their color (without knowing GTK etc.)?

^^ About themes. Are there any themes for gtk3 that look aesthetic? The default adawaita theme is pure ugliness. I've downloaded some themes from gnome-look.org, some apps look nice, but some apps are styled like windows 98. Only window border look ok.

Very much a question of personal taste, don't you think?
I've found some stuff I really like there. Unfortunately, some features of an app's look can't be changed/improved by the desktop theme - an ugly app will stay so even if surrounded by a beautiful frame...

bump

Don't go through all that trouble. Extract the tarball to ~/.themes. It's what installing the theme through Tweak Tool does anyway.

Likely the Windows 98 looking program is a GTK+ 2 program, and the theme does not include a GTK+ 2 version of the theme.