How to install the Ambiance Crunchy GTK theme on Linux
Ambiance Crunchy is an Ubuntu-like GTK theme collection for alternative desktop environments such as XFCE4, Mate, and even window managers such as OpenBox and Fluxbox. It’s a theme package, and users will have access to many different color styles, such as blue, green, and others.
The Ambiance Crunchy theme pack is targeted at lightweight desktop environments and Window managers. However, it also runs well on more modern ones such as Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, and others.
Note: Ambiance Crunchy is a GTK theme, so it is not compatible with the KDE Plasma 5 or LXQt desktops, as they are not based on GTK.
Download Ambiance Crunchy
Getting Ambiance Crunchy on Linux requires downloading the theme archive file directly from Gnome-look.org. Sadly, it isn’t possible to grab with a command-line downloader such as wget. Instead, you must go to the Ambiance Crunchy page on Gnome-look, and click on the “files” tab.
Once on the files tab, you’ll see two download links. The first link on the list is for the Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme. Ignore that one, make your way to the second link, and click the blue icon to start the download process.
When the downloading process is done, open up your Linux file manager or a terminal window and move on to the next section of the guide.
Extracting Ambiance Crunchy
Extracting the Ambiance Crunchy theme archive can be done in two ways: the Linux terminal and via GUI in the file manager. In this guide, we’ll show you how to do it in both ways.
File manager
To extract the Ambiance Crunchy theme in your Linux file manager, ensure that your file manager is open. Then, click on the “Downloads” folder to navigate to where your browser downloaded the archive to.
In the “Downloads” folder in the Linux file manager, locate the TarGZ archive file labeled “Crunchy-themes.tar.gz” and right-click on it with the mouse to bring up the right-click menu.
Look through the right-click menu for the “Extract” option and click it. Doing this should automatically extract it to a sub-folder with the “themes” label.
Terminal command-line
To extract the Ambiance Crunchy theme archive through the terminal, you’ll need to use the tar command. In the terminal, do the following.
First, move the terminal session from the home directory (~/) into the “Downloads” folder where your browser stored the archive.
cd ~/Downloads
Once in the downloads folder, use the tar command to extract the Ambiance Crunchy theme fully.
tar xvf Crunchy-themes.tar.gz
When the tar command finishes extracting everything, Ambiance Crunchy will be in the “themes” directory in your “Downloads” folder.
From here, do yourself a favor and read the “00-How_to” file. This how-to file is optional, but it gives special instructions on how to enable features in Fluxbox, and others which can aide your Ambiance Crunchy experience.
Install Ambiance Crunchy
Setting up the Ambiance Crunchy GTK theme on Linux is done by placing files in the system’s theme directory (for system-wide) or a user’s theme folder (for a single-user.)
To install Ambiance Crunchy on Linux, you’ll need to use the terminal window. Press Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard and follow the instructions below to get the theme installed correctly.
Install for a single-user
To install the Ambiance Crunchy GTK theme pack for a single user on Linux, you’ll need first to create a local theme folder to store the files. Using the mkdir command, create a new folder labeled “.themes.”
mkdir -p ~/.themes
With the theme folder taken care of, use the cd command to move into the “themes” folder.
cd ~/Downloads/themes/
Using the mv command, take all of the Ambiance Crunchy theme files and install them to the “~/.themes” directory.
mv * ~/.themes/
Install system-wide
Setting up the theme Ambiance Crunchy theme system-wide is a good thing to do if you need multiple users to have access to it, rather than just one user. To do this, you must install everything to the “/usr/share/themes/” directory.
In the terminal window, cd into the “Downloads” directory where the “themes” folder is.
cd ~/Downloads
Next, move into the “themes” folder.
cd themes
Finally, use the mv command to install all of the Ambiance Crunchy themes in the pack into your Linux PC’s system folder.
sudo mv * /usr/share/themes/
Activating Ambiance Crunchy
To get the Ambiance Crunchy GTK theme working on Linux, you must go through the process of enabling it in the system settings. To do this, open up your settings application, and search for “Appearance,” or something similar. Alternatively, take a look at the list of links below for help. Each list item outlines how to apply custom settings, such as GTK themes, custom icons, and more!
