Making GTK3 apps try to look more native in XFCE on Debian

XFCE is a GTK2 environment, however a lot can be done to improve GTK3 apps on XFCE.

I prefer to use Clearlooks as my GTK2 theme and use the GNOME icon set. On Debian, apt-get install gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-extras gnome-icon-theme-symbolic clearlooks-phenix-theme and use the XFCE Appearances to change your theme to Clearlooks-Phenix and your icons to GNOME.

If you’re using an XFCE GTK engine theme instead, install gtk3-engines-xfce instead of clearlooks-phenix-theme, and there also is a gtk3-engines-oxygen which provides a native look-alike of KDE4’s Oxygen theme.

You probably should restart your X session after fiddling around with this to fix apps that don’t change themes at runtime properly.

Written by
Patrick McFarland
Open Source software architect and technologist. He's just this guy, you know? Follow him him on Google+.
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Published September 18th, 2012

Comments

One Response
John Wells
November 26, 2013 at 11:18 pm | Reply

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.

To install Xfce on debian 7 wheezy
# apt-get install xorg xfce4 xfce4-goodies thunar-archive-plugin synaptic gdebi wicd

To install extra XFCE packages
# apt-get install xdg-utils xfce4-power-manager xfce4-goodies htop bzip2 zip unzip unrar-free

There are more gui to choose from http://namhuy.net/1085/install-gui-on-debian-7-wheezy.html

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