How to install the Orangini GTK theme on Linux
Orangini is an orange, gray, and silver GTK theme for Linux. It’s targeted at Gnome Shell and GTK 3, but it is very versatile and works on many GTK-based desktop environments such as XFCE4, Cinnamon, Budgie, and others. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to download Orangini, how to install it, and how to activate it too!
Downloading Orangini GTK
You can get your hands on the Orangini GTK theme on Gnome-look.org. To download it, click on the “Files” tab. The files tab has a few releases of the GTK theme. Look to the DL column, and click on the blue button next to the 2.3 version of Orangini.
After selecting the “DL” button, a pop-up window will appear on the screen. In the pop-up window, click on the “Download” option to grab Orangini. Alternatively, grab 2.2, if you prefer, but it may have some bugs to it.
Along with being hosted on Gnome-look.org, Orangini is on GitHub. The GitHub release of the GTK theme is just as good as what is on Gnome-look.org, however, it requires users to tinker with the Git program, so we will not be covering that installation method in this guide. For more information on the GitHub release of Orangini, click here.
Extracting Orangini GTK
The Orangini GTK theme comes in a TarXZ archive. TarXZ archives must be extracted with the terminal using the tar command. Open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Once the terminal window is open, make use of the following tar command.
tar xvf ~/Downloads/orangini-2.3.tar.xz
Or, if you’ve downloaded the 2.2 release of Orangini, you can extract it with the command below.
tar xvf ~/Downloads/orangini-2.2.tar.xz
Once everything is extracted from the TarXZ archive, the Tar tool will have created a directory in the “Downloads” directory with the name of orangini-2.3 or orangini-2.2. To verify the content in these folders, to make sure that the extraction was successful, run the ls command.
To view the contents of the orangini-2.3 folder, execute the following commands in a terminal window.
cd ~/Downloads ls orangini-2.3
Alternatively, if you’ve downloaded the 2.2 release of the Orangini, you can look at the folder with the commands below.
cd ~/Downloads ls orangini-2.2
When you’ve looked at the contents of the extracted folder, move on to the installation section of the guide.
Installing Orangini GTK
Installing GTK themes on Linux can be done in two ways. The first way to install a theme is by setting it up in single-user mode. Single-user mode means that only the user that installs the theme can access it and use it. The second way of installation is known as a system-wide mode. System-wide mode allows everyone to access the theme, not just the person who installed it.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up the Orangini GTK theme on your Linux PC in both single-user mode and system-wide mode. To start the installation, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, enter the command-line installation instructions that correspond with the style of installation you prefer to do.
Single-user installation
To install the Orangini GTK theme as a single-user, start out by creating a new folder with the name of “.themes”. This directory goes in your home folder and is where the Orangini GTK theme needs to be installed for single-user mode.
Using the mkdir command, make the .themes folder.
mkdir -p ~/.themes
After creating the new folder, move the terminal session into the “Downloads” directory with the CD command. The “Downloads” folder is where you previously extracted the theme files.
cd ~/Downloads
Using the mv command, place the Orangini GTK theme files into the new .themes folder.
mv orangini-*/ ~/.themes
System-wide installation
To install the Orangini GTK theme in system-wide mode, start out by using the CD command to move the terminal window into the “Downloads” directory where the theme files are.
cd ~/Downloads
Now that the terminal window is in the “Downloads” directory, elevate the terminal session to root access using the sudo -s command.
sudo -s
Once the terminal session has root access, use the mv command to install the Orangini GTK theme files to the /usr/share/themes/ directory.
mv orangini-*/ /usr/share/themes/
Activating Orangini GTK
Orangini is now installed on your Linux PC, but the setup process is not yet complete. You still need to activate Orangini as the default GTK theme. To do that, launch “Settings” and find “Appearance” or “Themes”. Then, change the default GTK theme to Orangini. Or, if you can’t figure out how to swap out the default GTK theme on your Linux PC, check out the links below. It’ll help you figure out how to customize your Linux desktop of choice.
