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A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.

Faience gtk themes

The Faience GTK / GNOME Shell themes were designed by Tiheum (Matthieu James), who's best known for his work on the popular Faenza and Faience icon themes, and they were first released in 2012.

The themes (which will probably remind you of the old Equinox themes - remember them?) didn't see any update since January 2013, until a couple of days ago when they were resurrected by Matthieu, who released a new version compatible with GNOME 3.10.

Why GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10? Well, Ubuntu 14.04 uses GTK 3.10, and not the latest version (3.12), and I assume the theme pack won't be updated for GTK / GNOME 3.12 until that's used by Ubuntu.

The pack comes with 3 GTK themes (Faience, Faience Claire and Ocre) and one GNOME Shell theme, which you can see in the screenshots below:

Faience gtk themes
Faience GTK2 theme

Faience gtk themes
Faience GTK3 theme

Faience gtk themes
Faience Claire - Unity

Faience gtk themes
Faience GNOME Shell theme

Faience gtk themes
Faience GNOME Shell + GTK theme

Faience gtk themes
Faience GNOME Shell theme

Faience gtk themes
Faience GTK under GNOME Shell

Faience gtk themes
Faience Ocre dark GTK theme

Faience Claire and Faience Ocre are mostly the same - on a first look, the only difference that I've noticed is that Faience Ocre has a dark variant (used by some apps such as the image viewer or Totem). Since under Unity, the Faience Ocre theme titlebar doesn't change with the GTK theme for dark applications, I assume Faience Ocre is for GNOME Shell only and Faience Claire for Unity.


Install Faience GTK / GNOME Shell themes in Ubuntu 14.04


The Faience GTK / GNOME Shell themes are available in a PPA, for Ubuntu 14.04 (requires GTK / GNOME 3.10). Add the PPA and install the themes in Ubuntu 14.04 using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tiheum/equinox
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install faience-theme

To change the theme in Unity, you can use a tool such as Ubuntu Tweak or Unity Tweak Tool. For GNOME Shell, you can change the theme using GNOME Tweak Tool.

For other Linux distributions, download the themes from DeviantArt (you'll need GTK / GNOME 3.10, the Murrine GTK2 and Unico GTK3 engines).