In the Debian/LMDE repositories there are some very interesting and nice Gtk themes and icon sets, but not attractive enough for my taste.
The default theme in LMDE , Mint-X , is lovely to me, but it's good to change things up now and again, and the Ambiance/Radiance GTK themes that come by default in Ubuntu are truly beautiful.
The idea is to go from this:
to this:
or to this:
The first thing we need to do is modify a parameter in Synaptic 's options so that it uses the Debian Testing repository as the primary repository , instead of LMDE . This is necessary because when installing the .deb file with the Ubuntu themes , we'll encounter a dependency error, since the installed Murrine GTK engine is too old.
We open Synaptic » Settings » Preferences and in the distribution tab we select Testing.
This will only work if you have configured the repository as explained in this link . Now, update the packages using Synaptic if you haven't already, and install gtk2-engines-murrine.
Next, we downloaded three .deb files containing: the Ubuntu Mono icon theme , the Ubuntu Humanity icon theme , and the Ubuntu GTK themes . All of these are necessary for a successful installation. We placed them all in the same folder, opened a terminal, and ran the following command:
$ sudo dpkg -i * .deb
They should be installed without any problem.
We can now select the new themes in Menu » Applications » Preferences » Appearance , but the packages belonging to Gnome3 will not be displayed correctly , so we apply the tip I showed in this article.
Hack for Ambiance.
sudo cp -r / usr / share / themes / Ambiance / / usr / share / themes / Ambiance3 / sed -e 's / Ambiance / Ambiance3 / g' /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/index.theme | sudo tee /usr/share/themes/Ambiance3/index.theme sudo cp -r /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/ / usr / share / themes / Ambiance3 /
Hack for Radiance.
sudo cp -r / usr / share / themes / Radiance / / usr / share / themes / Radiance3 / sed -e 's / Radiance / Radiance3 / g' /usr/share/themes/Radiance/index.theme | sudo tee /usr/share/themes/Radiance3/index.theme sudo cp -r /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/ / usr / share / themes / Radiance3 /
This will be more than enough 