2

I have switched from Debian with systemd to Devuan without systemd and my quality of life has much improved. Both operating systems have xfce4 as desktop environment. But I have noticed that all the color themes in Settings -> Appearance -> Style (I believe this is known as GTK+ themes?) are missing. The themes that came with standard Debian Bullseye were called: Adawaita, Adawaita-dark, High Contrast, Raleigh, Xfce, Xfce-4.0, Xfce-4.2, Xfce-4.4, Xfce-4.6, Xfce-b5, Xfce-basic, Xfce-cadmium, Xfce-curve, Xfce-dawn, Xfce-dusk, Xfce-flat, Xfce-kde2, Xfce-kolors, Xfce-light, Xfce-orange, Xfce-redmondxp, Xfce-saltlake, Xfce-smooth, Xfce-stellar, Xfce-winter. There is only one theme in the Devuan xfce4-install, and I prefer to change it to one of those that came with standard Debian. Therefore I have some questions:

  • Were the themes that came with Debian Bullseye contained in some package? If so, what's it called? My goal is to apt install it if possible.
  • If it is not possible: I noticed in the past that there were subdirectories in /usr/share/themes with names that match the labels in Settings -> Appearance -> Style on Debian Bullseye. Are these connected to the themes in Settings -> Appearance -> Style?
  • If I install Debian again, can I somehow move them over to Devuan by copying?
  • If so, how would I do it?

PS: I know there are entire websites dedicated to color themes for xfce4, that's not the question.

Stephen Kitt
  • 411,918
  • 54
  • 1,065
  • 1,164
Mikkel Rev
  • 243
  • 1
  • 8

1 Answers1

1

I don't know the exact packages containing the themes you're interested in, but you may find some of them with apt-cache search xfce theme or apt-cache search gtk theme and similar searches.

If you still have access to a Debian system with these themes installed, you can use dpkg -S (or dlocate if you have it installed) to find out which package(s) contain particular filenames.

e.g. by guessing that the Xfce-basic theme might be in a file or directory called Xfce-basic you can run dpkg -S Xfce-basic (or dlocate Xfce-basic, etc) and discover that it is in the gtk3-engines-xfce package on Debian:

$ dpkg -S Xfce-basic
gtk3-engines-xfce: /usr/share/themes/Xfce-basic/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
gtk3-engines-xfce: /usr/share/themes/Xfce-basic
gtk3-engines-xfce: /usr/share/themes/Xfce-basic/gtk-3.0

Note that themes packaged for Debian may or may not work on Devuan - they may depend on packages which don't exist on Devuan.

BTW, Adawaita is a Gnome theme - does Devuan have Gnome?

Also BTW, there are several themes in the mate-themes package (on Debian - I don't know if it's on Devuan) which work well with xfce - I use the TraditionalOk theme on my Debian xfce desktop machines.

cas
  • 1
  • 7
  • 119
  • 185
  • Thanks for that. It seems Devuan doesn't have those packages. Would you have knowledge of how to move themes over manually? How would I get Xfce-basic to show up on Devuan, for example? – Mikkel Rev Sep 17 '22 at 18:56
  • Sorry, apart from just copying the relevant file(s) to the appropriate location (or extracting them from the .deb with `dpkg -x`), I have no idea. I have little interest in themes, my only real interest is that they not be garish, animated, expect me to interpret inscrutable hieroglyphics, or be otherwise annoying. unfortunately, most theme developers seem to have the exact opposite goals :-( – cas Sep 18 '22 at 07:52