How to install the Uos icon theme on Linux
Have you ever used the Deepin desktop environment on your Linux PC? Do you like the icon theme? Stopped using Deepin but miss using the beautiful icon theme? Check out Uos! It’s the Deepin icon theme, but for any desktop environment on Linux. In this guide, we’ll go over how to set it up on any Linux OS desktop environment.
Downloading Uos on Linux
The Uos icon theme is available for download on the Gnome-look theme website. To get your hands on the latest release, do the following. First, click this link here to head over to the Uos Gnome-look.org page. Once there, click on the “Files” tab. From there, look to the “DL” column, and click on the blue button. When you select the blue button, a pop-up window will appear. Click on the “Download” button to grab the latest release of Uos.
Another way to download the Uos icon theme on your Linux desktop is via GitHub. However, the GitHub release of the Uos icon theme will not be covered in this guide. If you would like to download the GitHub version of the Uos icon theme, click here.
Extracting Uos on Linux
The Uos icon theme is distributed on Gnome-look.org in a TarXZ archive file. These types of archives are excellent for sharing many files quickly and efficiently. However, Linux cannot use icon files that are in a compressed state. So, before we can go over how to install Uos on your Linux PC, we need to go over how to extract the contents of Uos-fulldistro-icons.tar.xz.
To start the extraction on your computer, launch a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Once the terminal window is open on the Linux desktop, run the CD command to move the terminal session into the “Downloads” directory, where Uos was downloaded earlier via your internet browser.
cd ~/Downloads
Inside of the “Downloads” directory, make use of the tar xvf command to fully extract the Uos-fulldistro-icons-tar.xz archive file.
tar xvf Uos-fulldistro-icons-tar.xz
Once everything is fully extracted, a folder with the name of Uos-fulldistro-icons will appear in your “Downloads” directory. Take a look at the contents of this directory using the ls command. Viewing the directory once extracted will allow you to confirm that the extraction was successful.
ls Uos-fulldistro-icons/
If nothing shows up when you run the above ls command, try re-running the tar command. When done viewing the folder, move on to the installation portion of the guide to get the Uos icon theme up and running on your Linux PC.
Installing Uos on Linux
The Uos icon theme can be installed in 2 ways on the Linux desktop. The first way to install the Uos icon theme is in single-user mode, a method of installation that allows only the user that installs it access to the icon files. The second method of installation is system-wide, which makes Uos available to every single user on the Linux computer, even if they haven’t installed the icons. In this guide, we’ll go over both methods of installation.
Single-user
To install the Uos icon theme in single-user mode, launch a terminal window. Once the terminal window is open, use the mkdir command to create a new folder with the name of “.icons.” This folder will hold the Uos icon theme files.
mkdir -p ~/.icons
After creating the new “.icons” directory, use the CD command to move the terminal session into the “Downloads” directory in which the Uos icon theme was extracted to previously. Then, using the mv command, place the Uos icon files into the “.icons” directory.
mv Uos-fulldistro-icons/ ~/.icons/
Once the Uos icon files are in the “.icons” directory, the installation is complete.
System-wide
To get the Uos icon theme set up system-wide so that everyone on your Linux PC has access to it, do the following. First, launch a terminal window. After that, use the CD command to move the terminal session from the home directory (~) to the “Downloads” folder where the Uos icon theme was previously extracted.
cd ~/Downloads
Once the terminal session is inside of the “Downloads” directory, you will need to elevate the terminal session from the regular user to the root account. The root account is required for manipulating the /usr/share/icons/ directory, where Uos needs to be placed. To access the root account, run sudo -s.
sudo -s
With the terminal in root mode, run the mv command to place the Uos icon files in /usr/share/icons/.
mv Uos-fulldistro-icons/ /usr/share/icons/
Activating Uos on Linux
The Uos icon theme is installed, but installing it on Linux is not enough. You also need to activate the theme before you can use it. To activate the Uos icon theme on the Linux desktop you use, check out the list of links below.
