Some weeks ago, I shown you a list of 30 themes for enhancing your Gnome desktop. Many readers loved the dark themes from this list, so here's a new list of 20 dark and absolutely beautiful themes for your Gnome desktop.
Mesmerized

Fedora Dark

GSM GTK

Coal and Glass

LUX

ClearBloodline

Shifty July

chris0

Ubuntu Studio

Overglossed

Bruzd Nodoka

Cobra

Black Fate

Murrina Limelight

Moomex Theme

Blue Joy

Hey, wait, there’s only 19 themes here! Yes, absolutely. Which theme will you suggest to be the 20th?

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48 Comments

  1. Dak
    Posted August 18, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Permalink

    I honestly think that the dark themes are ugly. I can see when Ubuntu 8.10 is released, thousands of users will be changing their themes to a lighter one. I’ve seen some of these dark themes that the taskbar is dark and the text on the taskbar is black, making it extremely hard to read. Whoever thought that theme scheme up needs to rethink it some more.

  2. Posted August 18, 2008 at 3:28 pm | Permalink

    I use light themes myself, because most of the time they’re more user-friendly than the dark ones. Though, I think that dark themes can be really beautiful.

  3. NiKoB
    Posted August 18, 2008 at 7:22 pm | Permalink
  4. Posted August 18, 2008 at 7:40 pm | Permalink

    Yeah I love Slickness Black :) I didn’t listed it here because it already was in the first Gnome theme list.

  5. Cobalt
    Posted August 19, 2008 at 3:10 am | Permalink

    A handful of these are really nice.

  6. Posted August 19, 2008 at 2:56 pm | Permalink

    People use dark themes mainly because they want to save their eyes. And these people typically use systems at night without any external light source.

    Thanks for the list.

  7. Alvare
    Posted August 19, 2008 at 8:39 pm | Permalink

    Them make the screen consume less power xD
    I use dark themes, but in KDE.

  8. lachild
    Posted August 19, 2008 at 8:46 pm | Permalink

    “Slickness Black is very cute too !”

    I agree, but to be honest Slickness (not the black version) is a tad bit nicer.

  9. Posted August 19, 2008 at 10:08 pm | Permalink

    Beautiful Screenshots and some great theme choices. I personally love dark themes right up until I open a browser and check my bank account.

    You can theme your desktop, but writing new CSS layouts for jaringly white sites gets old pretty quickly. For this reason, light themes are my default pretty much forever more.

  10. Ese
    Posted August 19, 2008 at 11:35 pm | Permalink

    Are you insane!? where have you left elegant brit!? that has to be the best and most complete dark theme around gnome-look

  11. Posted August 19, 2008 at 11:55 pm | Permalink

    @Ese: Elegant Brit was already listed in my previous theme list ;)

  12. Ese
    Posted August 20, 2008 at 12:06 am | Permalink

    Oh thank god, I thought you were insane…

  13. anon
    Posted August 20, 2008 at 3:53 am | Permalink

    I’ll never understand why people want their Linux desktop to look like Vista.

  14. Posted August 21, 2008 at 1:24 am | Permalink

    Got to say I like LUX, I always find it difficult to get a decent background that looks complex, and yet isn’t too overwhelming.

    Nice choices :)

  15. Posted August 21, 2008 at 6:42 pm | Permalink

    Im not a great fan of dark / black themes but some of these are excellent! Nice picks :)

  16. Posted August 21, 2008 at 6:58 pm | Permalink

    Thanks mozami! (Totally off-topic, but your website is really beautiful!)

  17. Pavel
    Posted August 25, 2008 at 7:23 am | Permalink

    Big thanks. Beautiful site. I’ll become your regular reader.

  18. Posted August 27, 2008 at 5:03 pm | Permalink

    it will definitely burn out the desktop hard. (?) . Hard work Done

  19. Posted August 29, 2008 at 1:46 am | Permalink

    Thanks a bunch for this list, I’ve been looking for some good skins ever since I installed Linux on my flash drive.

  20. Posted September 2, 2008 at 8:05 am | Permalink

    I know that white themes are more popular and admittedly they are more user friendly, but I cant help liking the dark ones better myself.

  21. Charlie M
    Posted September 3, 2008 at 10:20 pm | Permalink

    I used to really dislike dark themes, particularly the new one in the intrepid alphas. However I have been trying out one of the alternative intrepid ones, which works quite well. Its still dark but not completely black.

    The problem with dark themes is web browsing every site has a light background. So you can either override it and comply mess up the sites appearance, or you have a massive contrast change right in the middle of the screen. The semi-dark theme I am using seems to be a nice compromise.

  22. Posted September 13, 2008 at 5:04 pm | Permalink

    I don’t like darker themes too. Think they are a bit confused to read, although they seems beautiful at first.

    PS: Only to remember: the correct name of the desktop environment is “GNOME”. Yes, with all capital letters.

    I know that I’m being bore. But if you want to check how it’s name is written, just visit the official site: http://www.gnome.org

  23. Posted September 18, 2008 at 9:56 pm | Permalink

    What a wonderful post am really amazed to see why this post did’t touched digg FP because the collection really deserve it they are huge in numbers and very beautiful looking.

  24. Posted September 26, 2008 at 12:40 pm | Permalink

    Thx for this post! I love Blue Joy theme!

  25. Posted October 3, 2008 at 10:09 pm | Permalink

    Some people think that dark themes use less electricity, but that is not true of LCD screens, they use pretty much the same electricity whenever they are on. I think CRT gets some benefit tho’, so even if you use a blank screen as a screen saver, you aren’t saving energy (or your battery) unless you set the screen to power down.

    Also, I like dark themes, I use LinuxMint with the Peppermint theme, which is dark grey, I think really black themes cause visibility problems on some webpages, and really light ones seem old-fashioned. I do not think light themes are more user friendly, contrast is more important to usability (and accessability) IMHO

  26. Brandon
    Posted October 4, 2008 at 4:24 pm | Permalink

    I, personally, prefer light themes over darker themes for a few reasons. For one, it’s easier to see things.
    I dunno, just a thought :)

  27. Fernand
    Posted October 12, 2008 at 9:46 pm | Permalink

    Willibex *really* kick ass, it’s the only dark theme I able to use:

    http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/show.php?content=86844

  28. DAAS
    Posted November 2, 2008 at 8:10 am | Permalink

    my favorite is blue joy, but i can’t use it because it makes my eyes hurt when i’m chatting on emesene T-T
    I wish i could edit the entry box!

  29. Posted November 3, 2008 at 12:07 pm | Permalink

    Thank you sooooo much for posting these. You saved me hours of work.

    Again: thanks!
    Jason

  30. Posted December 18, 2008 at 4:44 pm | Permalink

    Great selection, especially like Fedora Dark, Shifty July and Ubuntu Studio! I’m going to try these out, thanks!

  31. Posted January 6, 2009 at 4:18 pm | Permalink

    very nice !

  32. Posted January 13, 2009 at 7:49 am | Permalink

    You saved me hours of work, thanks for the list. I really like everything in dark color :D . This list will in my dark collection list

  33. Posted February 3, 2009 at 11:56 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for the theme suggestions! Great selection!

  34. Posted February 4, 2009 at 12:57 pm | Permalink

    Shit, my mouth is wide open while I’m looking at those graphics. I mean, WOW!! Great resource man, no wonder people are switching to Ubuntu!!

  35. naughtykid
    Posted February 28, 2009 at 8:14 pm | Permalink

    prefer dark theme for the sake of the eyes.
    sometimes staring too long on the light themes makes my eyes pain. anyway, it did help to make me have a lighter mood. Dark theme is pretty cool most of the time. Suggest the 20th is the HP mini version. It’s pretty cool too.

  36. Posted March 11, 2009 at 10:48 am | Permalink

    I am a recent Ubuntu convert and it seems that every day I find something cool for my new O/S.

  37. Posted April 4, 2009 at 3:12 pm | Permalink

    Wow. Some great theme packages for Ubuntu here. I’ve never used the OS but it’s nice to see if I did, I could do it in style.

  38. molecule-eye
    Posted May 17, 2009 at 12:41 am | Permalink

    My favs are Cole (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Cole?content=103837), which requires a bit of tweaking (making text brighter and scrollbars more visible), together with the ALLWHITE icon theme, and T3K (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/T3K?content=93372) with the Ice icon theme, and finally Mira (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Mira+0.2.1?content=102281).

  39. Inder...
    Posted June 8, 2009 at 6:47 pm | Permalink

    Hey,
    This ain’t one of Your impressive posts…

  40. Posted June 8, 2009 at 8:46 pm | Permalink

    @Inder… : Why?

  41. Posted June 11, 2009 at 7:34 am | Permalink

    wow, black fate is beauty

  42. Posted August 18, 2009 at 9:46 pm | Permalink

    really beautiful, thanks !

  43. Posted October 9, 2009 at 10:20 pm | Permalink

    The problem with dark themes on any operating system is that the applications end up hardcoding text colors and not background colors, resulting in black text on a black background (Ex: http://projects.gnome.org/dia/faq.html [This one sets the background white with CSS, but doesn't set the text color]). I’ve tried over and over to use dark themes on my Windows and Linux PCs mainly because it’s better on the eyes at night, but it never works out. There’s not really anything anyone can do about this, because it’s too easy for programmers to set either the background color or the forground color and assume that all computers have a white background and black text. I honestly don’t see this problem ever being fixed in the future of man kind.

  44. dominik
    Posted January 26, 2010 at 9:18 am | Permalink

    Absolutely beautiful! Thanks so much :)

  45. Posted February 6, 2010 at 1:36 am | Permalink

    Answering firsts post about the convenience of dark themes:

    The darker the desktop is, the less your eyes will suffer, now, or after a long time.
    That has been historically known, and one of the reasons why old text mode OS used black balckground and clear text.

    Everything got messed in the time windowed systems appeared, turning into white bright screens (my eyes felt a knock).

    Although, most of nowadays linux themes, even dark, have low contrast that makes them be even worst for eyes and less usable. That problem use to not appear with light ones since people use black fonts.

    A dark theme should have costrasted content.

  46. Posted April 21, 2010 at 8:31 am | Permalink

    I think what people use has a lot to do with personality and mood. Dark themes may be good for some people.

  47. Posted June 19, 2010 at 12:05 pm | Permalink

    It’s important to remember, though, that it’s more difficult to read white text on a black background than black text on a light background.

  48. Posted July 24, 2010 at 6:45 pm | Permalink

    My favs ubuntu themes is maxicity products. Thank you for sharing.

8 Trackbacks

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  8. [...] you often read my blog, you probably noticied that on my 20 beautiful dark themes for Gnome and Ubuntu article, I only listed 19 themes, and asked the readers to suggest the last one. That was a pretty [...]

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