Author(s)

aier, othariste

This article is currently under construction!

TODO List:

Extensions:

• Blur My Shell
• User Theme (shell theme)
• Dash To Dock
• Just Perfection

Legacy themes:

• adw-gtk3

Others:

• Sound
• Cursor
• Icons
• Font
• GTK4 theme

Introduction

When you first installed Gnome, does everything feel off? Icons are weird, notifications are centered, where are my apps? In this article, we will introduce the concept of ricing to make Gnome feel as comfy and beautiful as you want.

Info

Ricing is the process of customizing aesthetics (in this case, your desktop) to fit your tastes

All ricing tips and tricks are optional and are not necessary and add no utility.

Legacy Themes

Using adw-gtk3

adw-gtk3 is a theme that makes older GTK3 apps look more modern and consistent with their newer GTK4 counterparts.

• Installation

  Fedora

  sudo dnf install adw-gtk3

  Arch

  pacman -S adw-gtk-theme

  Debian/Ubuntu

  curl -s https://julianfairfax.codeberg.page/package-repo/pub.gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/julians-package-repo.gpg
  echo 'deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/julians-package-repo.gpg ] https://julianfairfax.codeberg.page/package-repo/debs packages main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/julians-package-repo.list
  sudo apt install adw-gtk3

  In addition, you would want to install adw-gtk3 so that your Flatpak apps can be styled as well.

  Flatpak (System)

  flatpak install org.gtk.Gtk3theme.adw-gtk3 org.gtk.Gtk3theme.adw-gtk3-dark

• Usage

  Append changes (cli)

  dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme "'adw-gtk3'"

  Append changes (Gnome Tweaks)

  Appearance > Legacy Applications --> Adw-gtk3

  Reset changes (cli)

  dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme

  Additionally, you'd have to apply this theme for Flatpak apps, too.

  Append changes (cli)

  # Below are commands taken from the official adw-gtk3 GitHub Page
  sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-data/themes # Allow Flatpak apps to access system theme folder
  sudo flatpak mask org.gtk.Gtk3theme.adw-gtk3 # Prevent Flatpak from updating/replacing the adw-gtk3 theme
  sudo flatpak mask org.gtk.Gtk3theme.adw-gtk3-dark # Prevent Flatpak from updating/replacing the adw-gtk3-dark theme

Ocean Sound Theme

A refined professional sounding alternative to the default Gnome sound theme made by KDE.

• Installation

• Usage

Extensions

What are extensions?

Extensions are programs installed onto Gnome to allow extra functionality.
In this section, the following extensions are purely for ricing.

They're installed using the application "Extension Manager." Refer to our Apps-Library for installation.

Blur My Shell

User Theme

The General Idea

This extension allows Gnome to install themes downloaded online to make your desktop environment have a different aesthetic.

You will need to install Gnome-Tweaks to select the themes later

Steps Overview

• Downloading User-Themes extension

  • lorem

    Why?

  • This enables Gnome to install themes ::::

Enabling the ability to install themes isn't enough, we have to actually install the themes. Below steps record said progress.

Installing themes

• Download theme file

  • Download themes from the Pling Website
  • Click on desired theme
  • On the upper right hand side, click download and select desired color of the theme

    Why?

    These theme files contain the code for how the theme looks

• Extract the file

  • In your file manager(Nautilus), right click on the tar.gz file you just downloaded and click on "extract."

    Why?

    This decompresses the files from the tar.gz file format

• Move files into ~/.local/share/themes folder

  • Go into the extracted folder, select all the folders inside, move them to ~/.local/share/themes

    Warning

    In the case that the "themes" folder doesn't exist, create one yourself inside ~/.local/share/

    Why?

    The reason we put it in ~/.local/share/themes is because linux is built off file systems, everything is a file. We put the theme file in here so linux knows of the exsistence of these theme files.

• Selecting Theme using Gnome-Tweaks

  • Open Gnome-Tweaks.
  • Navigate into these tabs/headings: Appearance tab->Styles->Shell.
  • Under the shell drop-down you will see options for the themes you just extracted and moved. Select the theme you want.

    Note

    These theme options are present because the theme files were put into the directory linux recognizes as the place to look for themes.

---

Dash to dock

Dash to Panel

Others

Sound

Cursor

Icons

Font

Changelog

8/11/25, 3:11 PM

View All Changelog

• fa15b-Added authors, formatted ricing-gnome, contributors addedon 8/11/25
• 2bfa9-Completed Extensions/userthemes sectionon 8/10/25
• e218b-Created archived folder, archived qemu-kvm guide, written dev-setup-guideon 8/9/25
• 38b91-Clarify user theme description and mark adw-gtk3 as completed in the ricing guideon 8/5/25
• cbf9b-Under contruction labelon 7/28/25
• d40a3-Modularizing for individual articles to be less overwhelming.on 7/22/25