Users will have to install it the old fashioned way

Feb 18, 2015 16:00 GMT  ·  By

It looks like that Google's Material Design guidelines are making quite an impression, and developers have started to pay closer attention to them. Now we have a new theme that tries to respect the new guidelines and it's probably just the first of many.

A Linux distribution that aims to follow Google's Material Design is already in the works, so it's no wonder that a theme has also popped up. It's not exactly a new desktop shell and it only provides a minimalistic experience, but it's close enough and it manages to be a little bit different from what Linux users already have.

The new theme wasn't built from scratch and it's based on another one called Paper, which is actually designed by Sam Hewitt. Paper also follow the same guideline, but with a different color palette. It's different enough so the two of them won't be getting mixed up anytime soon.

The Azure Gtk theme is very new

It might not be immediately intuitive, but themes actually need a lot of work. All of the good ones that you can find right now for download actually went through several iterations, just like any other piece of software. This these is still young and there are plenty of problems left, but it's good enough to install and test.

This is dubbed as version 1.1 and it should work with Ubuntu 15.04, GNOME 3.14, and pretty much everything else that uses the GTK2 pixbuf engine or the gtk(2)-engines package.

The installation of the theme shouldn't take too long and it's pretty easy to do. Just download the archive from GitHub, extract it, and move the contents to the .themes folder. Activate the new theme with GNOME Tweak or Unity Tweak Tool.

Unfortunately, this is still under development and you won't be able to update it automatically when a new version is released. All updates will have to be done manually.

Update: After taking with Sam Hewitt, the original designer of the Paper theme, I found out that whoever packaged Azure GTK did so by removing all the GPL relevant information that pointed at the original creator.

Please take this into consideration when using this theme.