One of the most prolific Linux desktop theme creators – not to mention the best, imo – has released a brand new GTK theme for us all to be gaga over.
Designer Vince Liuice’s latest creation is called Nephritisand it was made available for download from Pling and from GitHub this weekend.
Nephritis maintains the high quality that this theme creator is famous for, and the theme looks pixel-perfect on my high-res screen, i.e. no blurry corners or pixelated edges that some themes inadvertently offer.
Still looking for options, Vince did the Nephritis theme available in light, dark and mixed versions. All come paired with a soothing teal accent color by default, making them the perfect complement to Vince’s Colloid icons theme.
Despite the macOS-y presentation in the following screenshots, they offer a good idea of the Nephrite GTK theme and its accompanying GNOME Shell theme:
Not teal activated? There are plenty of other options, and you can specify which accent color you want installed, with purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, and gray available. There are also dedicated shades to match the popular Dracula and North color schemes, if you prefer those.
As with many other Vince themes, there is an installation script provided. This makes it easy to install the Nephrite GTK theme on Ubuntu (and other possible distros, although I haven’t tried it). Tip: If you want to install all color variants so you can try them out in turn, just run the ./install.sh with the -t all flag.
To change themes in Ubuntu, you can use the GNOME Changes application. To change the GNOME Shell theme (as this also includes a companion Shell theme), you must first install the GNOME Shell “User Themes” extension and then use the GNOME Tweaks tool to change the Shell theme.
Be aware that the provided installer script automatically links the Nephrite theme to libadwaita, overriding the appearance of default libadwaita apps. If you don’t want this to happen, you need to install the theme manually.
If you do use the install script but later want to “undo” the theme affecting libadwaita apps, you need to manually delete the “Nephrite-Light” folder in ~/.themes/ (although this, of course, also removes the theme).
Let me know what you like about Nephrite in the comments – and let me know if you think this theme should take a spot on my list of best GTK themes for Ubuntu!
