How to install the Neon Knights icon theme on Linux
The Neon Knights icon theme is a colorful, beautiful icon theme. The style is very reminiscent of the KDE Plasma desktop’s “Breeze” theme with a modern twist. It is perfect for Linux users of all desktop environments looking to spice up the default icons on their desktop. Here’s how to get Neon Knights installed.
Note: Neon Knights relies on KDE’s Breeze icons to work. To install it, click here. Or, go to the Breeze icons GitHub page.
Downloading Neon Knights icon theme
To get your hands on the Neon Knights icon theme, you will not be able to open up a terminal and install it with Ubuntu Apt, Arch Linux Pacman, or Fedora Dnf. Instead, you must manually download the icon files from the internet. Specifically, the Neon Knights icon theme must be downloaded from Gnome-look.org, a popular Linux theme website.
To download, find the “Files” tab. After that, locate the “icons.tar.xz” link in the list of files, and click on the blue download button to grab the latest release of Neon Knights icon theme on your Linux PC.
Don’t want the latest version of the Neon Knights icon theme for your system? You’re also able to download older versions of the theme. To get these old versions, find “22 archived,” and click on it to view older icon downloads. Then, click on the blue download button to download it.
Extracting Neon Knights icon theme
The Neon Knights icon theme is distributed to users in a compressed TarXZ archive. This archive must be extracted, as all of the essential icon files are compressed, and will not work on any desktop as a TarXZ file.
To start the extraction of the Neon Knights icon theme, you must open up a terminal window. Launch a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, with the terminal window open, use the CD command to move the terminal session into the “Downloads” directory.
cd ~/Downloads
Inside of the “Downloads” directory, execute the tar command to decompress the Neon Knights TarXZ archive file fully.
tar xvf icons.tar.xz
Upon extracting the Neon Knights TarXZ file in your “Downloads” directory, six folders will appear. These folders are “Neon-Knights-Blue-Folders,”
“Neon-Knights-Green-Folders,” “Neon-Knights-Orange-Folders,” “Neon-Knights-Red-Folders,” “Neon-Knights-Violet-Folders,” and “Neon-Knights-Yellow-Folders.”
To confirm that the icon files are indeed in all of these six folders, run the ls command below. It will list the contents of all of the Neon Knights folders in your “Downloads” directory.
ls Neon-Knights-*Folders
After checking the contents of all of the extracted icon folders, installation can begin. Move to the next section of the guide to continue.
Installing Neon Knights icon theme
Installing icon themes on Linux can happen in two ways. The first way of installing icons is called “system-wide,” which makes the icon files available to every single user on the Linux system. The second way of installing icons is known as “single-user,” and it means that only one user has access to the installed icons. In this guide, we will go over how to install Neon Knights in both ways.
System-wide installation
To start the system-wide installation of the Neon Knights icon theme on your Linux PC, start by opening up a terminal window. Then, with the terminal, elevate it to Root by executing the sudo -s command.
sudo -s
After transferring root access to your terminal session, it is time to move to the “Downloads” directory. Using the CD command down below, access “Downloads.”
cd /home/YOUR_USERNAME/Downloads
Inside of the “Downloads” directory, make use of the mv command and use it to install all six of the Neon Knights icon files to the /usr/share/icons/ directory in the root file-system.
mv Neon-Knights-*Folders /usr/share/icons/
Once all the files are in place, run the ls command to confirm the installation was successful.
ls /usr/share/icons/ | grep Neon-Knights
Single-user installation
To install the Neon Knights icon theme as a single-user, start by opening up a terminal and making use of the mkdir command to create a new hidden directory labeled “.icons.”
mkdir -p ~/.icons
Next, using the CD command, move the terminal window into the “Downloads” directory, where all six of the Neon Knights icon folders are.
cd ~/Downloads
Using the mv command, place all six Neon Knights icon folders into the newly created “.icons” folder.
mv Neon-Knights-*Folders ~/.icons/
When all files are in place, execute ls to confirm that the installation process was successful.
ls ~/.icons | grep Neon-Knights
Enabling Neon Knights icon theme
The Neon Knights icon theme is now installed on your Linux PC. However, you must enable the theme in desktop settings. To do this, open up “Settings,” and locate the “Icons” or “Appearance” settings. Once inside of the “Icons” or “Appearance” settings, change the default icons in use to one of the six Neon Knights icons in the list.
Can’t figure out how to activate the Neon Knights icon theme on your Linux PC? Check out one of the links below!
