Gnome-Art Front-end: Installing Hundred of Themes in Gnome has Never been So easy!

Although Ubuntu Linux is a pretty solid, newbie friendly GNU/Linux (actually I'm not sure if it's really "GNU" these days :/) operating system. But, not everyone would agree on this, but in my point of view apart from all those powerful/solid features, creating a beautiful looking themes that are user friendly, we'll, that ain't Ubuntu's strength.

Anyhow the point is there are hundreds or thousands of themes available (for whatever the desktop that you're using) online, thus you can easily download something cool and easily solve that "issue".

Although the installation of these theme is pretty much simple, all you gotta do is just download the theme's archive (usually in "tar.gz" format) and then either extract or open the theme manager and just drag-n-drop would just do it.

But if you have a habit of continuously changing your themes (yikes!), say in Gnome desktop, then wouldn't it be nice that there is some kind of an application that automatically downloads all those themes via the official Gnome-Look web site and let you easily install or switch between themes in Gnome classic desktop easily?.

The awesome "Gnome-Art" utility...

Well there is such an application which is certainly not something new and I'm pretty much sure most of you guys know this but for those of you who haven't heard, it's called "Gnome-Art" (a front-end that uses the Gnome-look web site). It basically does the exact thing that I was rambling in the previous paragraph ;-) but to mention few of it main features...

*. Download and install GTK+ themes.

*. Application themes as well as icon themes.

*. Backgrounds.

*. Splash themes. 

*. Login-manager themes (GDM).

*. GTK theme engines.

*. Save themes to HDD for permanent access or clear the downloaded cache. 

But will this also work in Unity desktop?. Some of them, yes. But even if these themes apply under Unity, yet they won't change the color of the "dash" nor the "application launcher". So I think you get the idea. But they work perfectly well under Gnome classic desktop nonetheless.

You can install gnome-art theme manager in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install gnome-art

According to the developer's own words, this is not maintained anymore but it's still very useful + works quite well nonetheless.

By default it just shows an empty window. From its menu, click on: "Art" and then you'll be reveled of few sub menu, as shown in below screenshot.

From those menus, you can choose the type of themes that you want (icons or borders, etc as said before) and when you click on an option it'll start to download the category from the Gnome-look web link and then you can save them to disk or see previews before applying it as well.

It's very small yet a handy app to have around since it makes installing new themes in Gnome a hell lot easier! :).