Adwaita-GTK-Ubuntu

A modern Ambiance replacement that keeps Ubuntu's identity while staying upstream.

Motivation

Ambiance is over 8 years old now and does not stand a chance against other modern operating systems in terms of both looks and UX, which hurts Ubuntu's reputation and adoption. In our opinion this should be the maintainable theme to use if Communitheme will not get done in time for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release. It is not seen as a replacement for Communitheme, but rather as a sane fallback option.

Some of the reasons to use Adwaita (from the Ubuntu Community Hub) instead of Ambiance:

• Adwaita looks more modern than Ambiance
• Adwaita is developed with gnome-shell in mind instead of the now dead Unity7 Desktop
• Adwaita will be a lot easier to maintain
• Adwaita with Unity8 colors combines GNOME's great UX and the newest Ubuntu Design

Installation

A ppa will be provided in the future. Please install the adwaita-gtk-ubuntu.deb package or compile from source for now.

From package (for Debian-based systems, recommended)

Double-click adwaita-gtk-ubuntu.deb to install the theme with the GNOME Software Center or run the following:

sudo dpkg -i adwaita-gtk-ubuntu.deb

Now select the theme in GNOME Tweaks and log out and in again to insure that the theme has been applied completely.

From source

In order to do build the theme, you need to have the sassc package installed.

meson build --prefix=/usr
sudo ninja -C build install

To update the theme after you've made your own changes, just run the following again:

sudo ninja -C build install

Now select the theme in GNOME Tweaks and log out and in again to insure that the theme has been applied completely.

If you want to update the .deb package, run the following:

ADWAITA_GKT_UBUNTU_DIR="$(pwd)/usr"
meson build --prefix=${ADWAITA_GKT_UBUNTU_DIR}
ninja install -C build
dpkg-deb --build . adwaita-gtk-ubuntu.deb

This will create a fresh new package that you can install using by running the following command:

sudo dpkg -i adwaita-gtk-ubuntu.deb

or by double-clicking and installing the package using the GNOME Software Center.

Now select the theme in GNOME Tweaks and log out and in again to insure that the theme has been applied completely.

Screenshots

In addition to Adwaita-GTK-Ubuntu, there is also Adwaita-Shell-Ubuntu (WIP) and Adwaita-Icons-Ubuntu. These are minimal forks of upstream Adwaita, just like this theme. Colors from the official Unity8 documentation are being used. A wallpaper has also been created by nusi and can be found in the wallpapers folder in this repository.

There are multiple color variants that you may choose from:

• Unity8 Light Blue (default), which is #23A5D4
• Unity7 Orange, which is #E95420
• Unity8 Dark Blue, which is #335280

To enable one of them, remove the // in front of each variant at the bottom of Adwaita-Ubuntu/gtk-3.0/_colors.scss and the # at the bottom of Adwaita-Ubuntu/gtk-2.0/gtkrc. Make sure you only have all but one variant commented out!

Light versions of Nautilus

Dark versions of Nautilus

Ambiance's Nautilus for comparison

Ambiance does not have a dark version.

Light versions of the GTK3 Widget Factory

Dark versions of the GTK3 Widget Factory

Ambiance's GTK3 Widget Factory for comparison

Ambiance does not have a dark version.

Extras

Ambiance does not have a dark version.