How to install the Plane icon theme on Linux
Plane is a simple, beautiful icon theme for Linux. It uses a flat-like design, and all of the icons are very clean and easy to see. If you’re looking for a clean, flat set of icons for your Linux PC, follow along with this guide to get Plane working on your system!
Downloading Plane icons
To get your hands on the Plane icon theme for Linux, you will need to head over to Gnome-look.org. Once there, find the “Files” tab, and click on it with the mouse to access available files to download.
Inside of the “Files” tab, look through the two icon packs available for download. The first pack is PlaneDarkGnomedark-2-20200224214239.0.zip, and it is the dark version of the icon theme. The second is PlaneGnome-2.0.zip, which is the non-dark theme. Click on the blue button in the “DL” column, followed by the blue “Download” button to save it to your PC.
Extracting Plane icons
The Plane icon themes come packed in ZIP archives. To extract these archives, you will need a terminal window. Open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, from there, use the commands below to install the Unzip utility, a command-line tool that will help you extract the contents of the Plane archive you downloaded.
Ubuntu
To get Unzip on Ubuntu, run the Apt command.
sudo apt install unzip
Debian
To install Unzip on Debian, run Apt-get.
sudo apt-get install unzip
Arch Linux
On Arch Linux, install Unzip with pacman -S.
sudo pacman -S unzip
Fedora
Get the latest Unzip on Fedora with dnf.
sudo dnf install unzip
OpenSUSE
Set up Unzip on OpenSUSE with zypper.
sudo zypper install unzip
After setting up the Unzip application on your Linux PC, use the CD command to move the terminal session to the “Downloads” directory where you’ve downloaded the Plane icon pack.
cd ~/Downloads
Inside of the “Downloads” directory, run the commands below to extract the contents of the Plane ZIP files fully.
mkdir -p ~/Downloads/plane-dark mv PlaneDarkGnomedark-2-20200224214239.0.zip ~/Downloads/plane-dark/
cd ~/Downloads/plane-dark/ unzip PlaneDarkGnomedark-2-20200224214239.0.zip rm PlaneDarkGnomedark-2-20200224214239.0.zip
or
mkdir -p ~/Downloads/plane mv PlaneGnome-2.0.zip ~/Downloads/plane/ cd ~/Downloads/plane/
unzip PlaneGnome-2.0.zip rm PlaneGnome-2.0.zip
Once the extraction is complete, move on to the next section of the guide.
Installing Plane icons
Setting up icon themes on a Linux operating system can be done in two ways. The first way is single-user. Setting up icons as single-user means that only the user that installs the icon theme has access to it. The second way to set up icon themes is system-wide. System-wide means that no matter who installs the icons, everyone on the computer will have access to it and be able to set it as their default icon theme.
In this guide, we’ll be going over how to install the Plane icon theme in both ways. To start the installation, open up a terminal window and follow the command-line instructions below.
Single-user
To install the Plane icon theme as a single-user, you’ll need to start by creating a new folder. This new folder is “.icons” and will house all icon theme files in your home directory. To create the new folder, make use of the following mkdir command. Be sure to use -p switch! It will make the “.icons” folder permissions the same as the home directory.
mkdir -p ~/.icons
After creating the new “.icons” folder, use the CD command to move the terminal session to the “Downloads” directory, where the Plane icon files are.
cd ~/Downloads
Inside of the “Downloads” directory, make use of the mv command to move the theme files to the “.icons” directory. To install the Plane dark icon theme, move the “plane-dark” folder. To install the traditional Plane icons, move the “plane” folder.
mv ~/Downloads/plane-dark/ ~/.icons/ mv ~/Downloads/plane/ ~/.icons/
You can confirm the installation was successful with the ls command.
ls ~/.icons | grep plane
System-wide
To install the Plane icons as system-wide, start by moving to the “Downloads” directory with the CD command below.
cd ~/Downloads
After accessing the “Downloads” directory, elevate the terminal session from a traditional user to the root account using the sudo -s command below.
sudo -s
Once the terminal has root access, run the mv command to install the Plane icons on your computer.
mv ~/Downloads/plane-dark/ /usr/share/icons/ mv ~/Downloads/plane/ /usr/share/icons/
Enabling Plane icons
The Plane icon theme is installed on your Linux PC, but you will not be able to use it till it is enabled. To enable the Plane icons on your system, start by opening up the “Settings” window. Once inside of the “Settings” window, look for the “Appearance” or “Icons” area and change the default icon theme to Plane.
Are you having problems setting up Plane as the default icon theme on your Linux PC? Check out the links below to learn how to configure your Linux desktop to use the Plane icons.
