A fork of the Arc GTK theme is available on GitHub and it picks up exactly where the theme’s previous authors left off.
Why is this news? Well, you may recall I wrote about the dire state of Arc’s maintainer-ship a few weeks back. To put it bluntly: there isn’t one.
But a number of you got in touch with me after I published that post to let me know about a new, actively maintained, albeit unofficial, continuation.
And boy I am glad that you did!
This isn’t a stale fork of the Arc theme code, either. This is an actively maintained branch with lots of bug fixes and other finesse to bring the theme as up-to-date as possible.
‘Jnsh’ is the developer behind the revival and says the plan is to keep the theme “…updated with new toolkit and desktop environment versions, resolve pre-existing issues, and improve and polish the theme while preserving the original visual design.”
I.e. exactly what you want to hear, right?
There’s no official stable release as of writing, but a formal versioned drop of the ‘next-gen’ Arc theme is due to appear in the coming weeks. That version will carry lots of fixes, including a bunch for the recent GNOME 3.36 release.
Until then, you can manually build the “new” Arc theme from the source code that’s up on GitHub:
If you’re running Arch Linux then the ‘next-gen’ version is already available in the AUR.
While it’s a shame that the original author of the Arc theme hasn’t given the keys to the repo over to the new team (meaning a lot of distros are still packaging the old, buggy version) the plus side is that you at least you now know about it.
I’ll update my “how to install the Arc GTK theme on Ubuntu” guide In due course — though spoiler: it won’t be remains quite as succinct as running apt install arc-theme, like presently.
thanks to all who sent this in