A lot of people really like the Adwaita theme GNOME uses by default, but even its most ardent fans concede that its padding is a little too liberal in places.
Setting out to reign the excess is in is Adwaita Tweaks, a tweaked Adwaita theme that reduces the size of header bars and introduces transparency to the shell theme:
Compare the two screenshots above and you’ll spot the following ‘tweaks’:
- Makes the GNOME Shell theme semi-transculent
- Makes GTK header bars slightly smaller
- Removes the round inset corners from the top panel
- Removes arrows from menus
No, It’s Not the same as Minwaita
If you read this site regularly you may recall us writing about a similar theme called Minwaita — but don’t assume they’re the same.
Minwaita is a great theme in its own right, but it’s less of an Adwaita tweak and more of a reimagining. It has, for example, different windows controls, a different header bar gradient, and more comprehensive re-spacing.
For fans of the Adwaita theme it is just too different from the stock version they love.
And it’s for this reason that the more faithful Adwatia Tweaks theme was created.
Writing about the theme on Reddit, the theme’s author explains: “As a huge fan of the GNOME defaults, I decided to modify the few little things that were annoying me. I know Minwaita exists, but it changes the theme too much for my liking. This minimal “theme” is less than a hundred lines of CSS on top of the Adwaita theme.”
Download Adwaita Tweaks Theme
You can download Adwaita Tweaks from its Github page.
To install, download the repo, extract the .zip, and move the theme folder to the hidden ‘themes’ folder in your Home directory.
Finally, to switch to the GTK theme (and apply the GNOME Shell theme) use the indispensable GNOME Tweak Tool.