Ever find yourself wishing your GTK theme had a bit more depth to it?
If so, check out the Skeuos GTK theme by Daniel Ruiz de Alegría. His sumptuous skin skewers modern expectations by embracing the bevels, drop-shadows, and gradients most modern themes actively avoid.
The result is a confident look with real visible visual hierarchy to it. Buttons look like buttons, toggles look like toggles, and focused elements have clear presence — you won’t mistake a label for an action while using this theme.
Although it is still fairly flat (as themes go), in this era of ever-flatter UIs I’m surprised at how refreshing the theme’s “ornamentation” feels. It’s like a mix of Adwaita and elementary themes, with a splash of Layan for colour.
The Skeuos GTK theme is available in a range of colours, including black, blue, cyan, green, grey, magenta, orange, red, teal, violet, white, and yellow.
Each colour variation is available in a light or dark variant, and separate versions are available depending on desktop or theme environment (e.g., GNOME 3.36, GNOME 40, Cinnamon, XFWM4, etc).
And if all of that configurability isn’t enough you can also download a script from the theme’s GitHub page that lets you generate your own version of the theme using whatever colours you like.
Don’t get me wrong here, I love flat themes as much as the next person (assuming the next person does love them 😅). Heck, the omg! list of the best GTK themes for Ubuntu is pretty much exclusively flat themes, save for one.
So hey: it’s nice to have some tonal variation to gawk at for a change.
Download Skeuos GTK Theme
You can download the latest version of the Skueos GTK theme from GNOME Look:
The theme is available in a huge assortment of colours and combinations (as mentioned further up) so do make sure you download the correct version for your system, and install it accordingly.
On Ubuntu, just extract the theme .zip to the hidden ~/.themes folder (create the folder if it doesn’t exist). Finally, use a tool like GNOME Tweaks to change theme in Ubuntu (other DEs will vary).