20 beautiful dark themes for Gnome and Ubuntu

Posted by Jean-Baptiste Jung on Aug 18, 2008 | 48 comments

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.

Author : Jean-Baptiste Jung

Jean is a 27 years old self-taught web developer and WordPress specialist who lives in Wallonia, the French speaking part of Belgium. In addition to Cats Who Code, he also blogs about WordPress at WpRecipes and about Photoshop at PsdVibe.

» Website

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?

48 reactions

» Comments RSS Feed

1 - Dak on Aug 18, 2008, 2:38 pm:

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 - jbj on Aug 18, 2008, 3:28 pm:

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 on Aug 18, 2008, 7:22 pm:

Slickness Black is very cute too !

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Slickness+Black?content=73210

Thanks for having let me know about it ( http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/featured/30-gnome-themes-to-enhance-your-ubuntu-experience-18 )
4 - jbj on Aug 18, 2008, 7:40 pm:

Yeah I love Slickness Black I didn’t listed it here because it already was in the first Gnome theme list.
5 - Cobalt on Aug 19, 2008, 3:10 am:

A handful of these are really nice.
6 - Vamsee on Aug 19, 2008, 2:56 pm:

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 on Aug 19, 2008, 8:39 pm:

Them make the screen consume less power xD
I use dark themes, but in KDE.
8 - lachild on Aug 19, 2008, 8:46 pm:

“Slickness Black is very cute too !”

I agree, but to be honest Slickness (not the black version) is a tad bit nicer.
9 - Kevin Dean on Aug 19, 2008, 10:08 pm:

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 on Aug 19, 2008, 11:35 pm:

Are you insane!? where have you left elegant brit!? that has to be the best and most complete dark theme around gnome-look
11 - jbj on Aug 19, 2008, 11:55 pm:

@Ese: Elegant Brit was already listed in my previous theme list
12 - Ese on Aug 20, 2008, 12:06 am:

Oh thank god, I thought you were insane…
13 - anon on Aug 20, 2008, 3:53 am:

I’ll never understand why people want their Linux desktop to look like Vista.
14 - Dominic on Aug 21, 2008, 1:24 am:

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 - mozami on Aug 21, 2008, 6:42 pm:

Im not a great fan of dark / black themes but some of these are excellent! Nice picks
16 - jbj on Aug 21, 2008, 6:58 pm:

Thanks mozami! (Totally off-topic, but your website is really beautiful!)
17 - Pavel on Aug 25, 2008, 7:23 am:

Big thanks. Beautiful site. I’ll become your regular reader.
18 - Shanker Bakshi on Aug 27, 2008, 5:03 pm:

it will definitely burn out the desktop hard. (?) . Hard work Done
19 - hayes on Aug 29, 2008, 1:46 am:

Thanks a bunch for this list, I’ve been looking for some good skins ever since I installed Linux on my flash drive.
20 - Ann Arbor Web Design on Sep 2, 2008, 8:05 am:

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 on Sep 3, 2008, 10:20 pm:

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 - ZehRique on Sep 13, 2008, 5:04 pm:

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 - MOin on Sep 18, 2008, 9:56 pm:

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 - Poldi on Sep 26, 2008, 12:40 pm:

Thx for this post! I love Blue Joy theme!
25 - Emanuel on Oct 3, 2008, 10:09 pm:

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 on Oct 4, 2008, 4:24 pm:

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 on Oct 12, 2008, 9:46 pm:

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 on Nov 2, 2008, 8:10 am:

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 - Jason on Nov 3, 2008, 12:07 pm:

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

Again: thanks!
Jason
30 - Perder Barriga on Dec 18, 2008, 4:44 pm:

Great selection, especially like Fedora Dark, Shifty July and Ubuntu Studio! I’m going to try these out, thanks!
31 - Amir on Jan 6, 2009, 4:18 pm:

very nice !
32 - SEO Test on Jan 13, 2009, 7:49 am:

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 - Voos Baratos on Feb 3, 2009, 11:56 pm:

Thanks for the theme suggestions! Great selection!
34 - Abdulrehman on Feb 4, 2009, 12:57 pm:

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 on Feb 28, 2009, 8:14 pm:

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 - Tempo Web Design on Mar 11, 2009, 10:48 am:

I am a recent Ubuntu convert and it seems that every day I find something cool for my new O/S.
37 - Martin Fister on Apr 4, 2009, 3:12 pm:

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 on May 17, 2009, 12:41 am:

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... on Jun 8, 2009, 6:47 pm:

Hey,
This ain’t one of Your impressive posts…
40 - Jean-Baptiste Jung on Jun 8, 2009, 8:46 pm:

@Inder… : Why?
41 - Komunitas Linux on Jun 11, 2009, 7:34 am:

wow, black fate is beauty