‘Numix Square lends a softer, more playful appearance to your desktop’
Numix Square icon set can give your flagging desktop a throughly modern makeover.
The theme eschews hard lines, heavy borders and harsh shadows to lend a softer, colorful, and more playful appearance to your desktop.
Tying the look together is a rounded ‘scrabble tile’ square shape with a slight 3D perspective. This shape plays canvas to app logos and emblems, which range from simple symbolic icons to more intricate, layered designs.
Icon coverage is exhaustive, too. Pretty much every app I have installed — and keep in mind that I use some obscure pieces of software — has a Numix Square icon. App folders and panel icons inherit the base Numix icon theme (if installed) or the GNOME Icons/Adwaita (if not installed).
Numix Square icons were one of several packs previously available as a paid product on Linux. It was sold for small fee to help fund the development of the other (open source) Numix icon sets.
But no longer; the designers of the Numix Square icon set have announce that it is now open source and free to download.
“We’re in the process of open sourcing and updating a lot of the products we previously charged for,” reads an announcement on the Numix sub-reddit.
“The first of these is by far our most popular paid icon theme, Numix Square! It’s been given a major update to bring it on par with Numix Circle, including counless (sic) contributions from community member William Floyd.”
We featured Numix Circle, another icon set by Numix designers, in our list of the best icon themes for Ubuntu.
If you never had chance to try the Numix Square icon theme before — I hadn’t — now seems like the ideal time to do so.
Install Numix Square Icons on Ubuntu
Want to use the Numix Square icons on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and above? It’s easy enough. All you need are some fingers, a terminal and the Unity or GNOME Tweak Tool.
First, pop open a new Terminal window and run this command to add the Numix repository to your list of software sources:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:numix/ppa
Next, update your system’s list of packages, and install the icon theme:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install numix-icon-theme-square
Alternatively you can download the icon set from Github and install it manually:
Finally, to change icon theme on Ubuntu, use the Unity Tweak Tool (if you’re using Unity) or GNOME Tweak Tool (if you’re using GNOME Shell or a GNOME-based desktop like Budgie). Both tools are available to install for free from Ubuntu Software.