WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops
101 comments
·February 23, 2025_fat_santa
cosmic_cheese
I’ve not actually built any themes so take these thoughts with a grain of salt, but my impression is that with GTK at least, most of the problems come down to CSS conflicts and libadwaita doing its own thing separate from GTK proper. It seems like a lot of GTK apps hardcode colors, fonts, etc instead of parameterizing too, which means they aren’t going to respond to theme changes correctly. All together these combine to produce a pretty spotty theming experience.
Things seem a bit better on the Qt side of things, but it suffers resolution scaling issues. Most KDE/Qt themes I’ve tried can’t draw correctly at non-integer scales.
Personally I think that CSS is actually pretty badly suited for the use case of desktop UI toolkit theming. It’s fine for one-off apps but quickly becomes a mess when it needs to be part of a larger more flexible system.
kristopolous
personally I don't get it. If I wanted a macbook, I'd get a macbook. These things are cute and fun, ok, but do people actually want to use it?
cosmic_cheese
Desktop environments are inherently very personal things and so what one person might find great, someone else might consider unusable. Themes are a good way to add room for user preference without forcing the user to change desktop environments entirely.
For example, before libadwaita screwed it all up I used to like to apply a custom theme to GNOME to cut down on the egregious padding everywhere, making the UI a much better fit for non-touch desktop OS use on a small laptop screen. There were several themes that accomplished that very well.
asveikau
I think it made substantially more sense in the 1990s.
For one, Gtk+ used to be advertised as a multi platform toolkit, with a port of GDK to Win32. Making Gtk+ widgets look like Win32 made sense for that.
Secondly, there were two groups of people using Linux and X11 in that era: one group who were exiles from commercial Unix, and another, faster growing group coming from Windows. For the former group, it was reasonable to want widgets to look more like Motif or Athena. The latter group wanted a more modern look, which could depart from old school Unix workstations.
squiggleblaz
In fact, the only change from your characterisation is that the toolkit has been renamed from Gtk+ to GTK. Here is an example of a current claim: "GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, and macOS." https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/overview.html
I think what has changed is user expecations; in the the 1990s, there was an expectation that programs should look like the native toolkit; whereas by now, it's even questionable whether there is a native toolkit on Windows (due to the range of choice, each of which a noticeably different in look and feel) and program-specific appearance is the norm on mobile and web applications. Nowadays, you could probably write a slightly customised Adwaita app for Windows and you'd get by more satisfactorily than if you wrote a plain GTK app and tried to theme it to modern Win32.
joshuamt15
I just like how the cursor looks. I'd never buy a mac but I can admit the icons and design look nice.
pndy
Maybe Posy cursor would be a good substitute for you: https://michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
kristopolous
there's cursor themes on linux and although you have to apply them in the usual wonky linux way, it's totally possible and it is independent of the window manager.
Of course some applications do their own cursor management so if you do it poorly your cursor hops around themes as you drag it over various windows based on the toolkit they use but then again, that's what we all signed up for.
Fnoord
If you want Ubuntu theme but with different accent color, there is Yaru [1].
pooriamokhtari
> it just f*king works.
I think this is the first time I've heard anyone say this about the Linux desktop experience! Kudos to the GNOME/UBUNTU people I guess.
mitchell209
Even if a theme is perfect, it eventually stops getting updated with new versions of whatever you're using so you have to give it up eventually.
adityamwagh
Have you tried the Pop_OS theme? I think it looks good.
dtkav
Pop!_OS also has a built-in tiling window feature called "Automatic Window Tiling." It's integrated into the default desktop environment rather than being a separate tiling window manager like dwm. Nice to have something like dwm but without any fiddling.
andrepd
I've used Mint-X/Y (the default theme for Linux Mint on Cinnamon) for over a decade now, and my experience has always been great.
imp0cat
Yeah, the default Ubuntu theme is great.
And if you ever happen to feel adventurous, various Gnome extensions such as Burn My Windows can give you more than enough eye candy while still keeping the stock theme.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/
Retr0id
It's been a long time since I last installed a theme of any kind. In my past experiences, there was always aesthetic jank at the "boundaries" of themed vs unthemed elements. The "Fix for libadwaita (not perfect)" subheading doesn't inspire confidence - not a knock on this specific theme, just one of the hazards of theming in general.
al_borland
My issue tends to be that themes that try to emulate a different OS can only do it in style, not in function. So while a screenshot might look similar, it won't function in the same way as the OS it's trying to be, which leads to compromises all over the place... and the aforementioned jank.
Gnome, for example, doesn't have a minimize concept. There is an extension to add it, but it's janky and feels weird. No amount of theming is going to change this, when the underlying system wasn't designed around it.
cosmic_cheese
For GNOME, the bigger problem in my opinion is no option for a global menubar. Though there are similarities between macOS toolbars and GNOME headerbars, the former isn’t bearing nearly as much of a load as the latter is because Mac toolbars don't need to cover every function an app provides. Less-used/niche functions just don’t get a button and instead live tucked away neatly in one of any number of menus at the top of the screen.
On the other hand in GNOME apps, if a function isn’t used often enough to earn a spot in the app’s headerbar or hamburger menu it just gets tossed, because otherwise the hamburger menu becomes long and unusable. This results in less functional apps that are not as well equipped to keep up with growth in the user’s skill.
jorvi
Gnome does have a minimize concept? It's just hidden (haha) by default.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close"exe34
I could live with the jank and functionality if it would stay consistent over time - but you know it's going to be broken at the next GNOME update, and the next version won't just suck more, but the theme will also not quite work anymore and it's like multiple papercuts every time. Nowadays I have xmonad, xterm and emacs and a few gnome apps but I would replace them in a heartbeat if they annoyed me enough.
andrepd
Breaking UI and functionality for no reason whatsoever, with no option to change it back, often with mandatory updates, is one of my #1 pet peeves with modern software.
ahoka
“Fix” means hack here. GNOME and libadwaita does not officially support changing the theme like this.
hollerith
Also, plugins (and themes) have a short expected lifetime on Gnome because it is tedious for a maintainer to adapt the plugin to the high rate of churn in Gnome.
cosmic_cheese
IIRC GNOME also doesn’t have much of an official plugin API, which makes the situation that much worse. Plugins just have to tinker with GNOME internals and hope for the best.
mystifyingpoi
I remember the massive PITA that was running KDE with Gnome apps (or vice versa). The eyesore was unbelievable, and the official fixes required installing extra bridge themes, that tried to unify the look of everything, which of course wasn't perfect. This is better now, but even in 2025 GParted looks wrong under KDE, and this is sad.
pjerem
> even in 2025 GParted looks wrong under KDE, and this is sad.
I did care a lot about this 10-15 years ago. Unfortunately, somehow I don’t even notice this anymore. In 2025, and thanks to web apps, everything looks wrong on my desktop.
It doesn’t help that I’m a developer and that basically not any single modern IDE / text editor cares about looking native.
Even Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t looking integrated anymore.
Fnoord
Qt has been having good compatibility for Gtk for a long, long time. The other way around not so much.
OsrsNeedsf2P
This is true for most Gnome themes, but I used Chicago95 (on XFCE) for 3 years and could count the "jank" on one hand: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
rbanffy
I know there is no accounting for taste, but... If I wanted the 90's back, I'd go with OpenLook or IRIX's theme.
OsrsNeedsf2P
I was at a Ubuntu conference in Korea a few years ago and there was this kid with a Macbook running Linux but it was themed perfectly to MacOS.
It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI didn't work.
rbanffy
> It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI didn't work.
Let me guess... Nvidia?
ramon156
I cannot stress enough how much the nvidia situation pisses me off. I've had to convince colleagues that their bad experience is with nvidia drivers, not linux.
If your only solution is to buy a completely different version of a laptop to fix jankyness, most people would just say fuck it and opt for a macbook instead. It's a shame people dismiss linux because of that experience, but I cannot blame them.
nullifidian
This reminded me of the anti-theming sentiment in the gnome developer community https://stopthemingmy.app/
saghm
I'd happily never customize a theme again if there were any other easy way to actually pick the background and foreground colors on all of my apps. I like having white text on a black background, not a "dark" gray background and white text (and certainly not some off-white background with some dark but not fully black text, which I find even worse than just a typical black text on white background theme). I'm well aware of the fact that it probably does nothing in terms of actually affecting the battery life of my devices, and that dark gray is considered "better" from design perspective, but I don't care, because I happen to like the way the color scheme I describe looks, and I don't see why it should matter whether it does to anyone else if it's just going to be on a device that I'm the only one who ever uses. For whatever reason, this is next to impossible to do without rolling my own GTK theme (not even just using one that someone else had made, because I literally couldn't find one that just changed the background to black without having a bunch of other opinionated decisions on icons and padding and stuff), so that's what I do. I'm grateful that this is even possible though, because apps that aren't GTK (or Qt, which is also possible to theme) often don't provide any ability to theme whatsoever. With the exception of coding editors, I'm not sure I've ever found an Electron app that actually lets me pick a fully black background color, so despite not being particularly dogmatic in my opposition to them, I always try to run stuff like Slack and Discord in the browser so I can theme them with custom CSS. (I'm vaguely aware that this might be possible to do with the electron apps as well by running in some sort of developer mode, but I can't be bothered to spend a bunch of time trying to replicate what I already have working in the browser for their sites).
Expressing their argument as "don't use custom themes" just makes it less convincing when there aren't really any other easy ways to get the flexibility from them that doesn't cause any of the issues they cite. It would be like finding out that a friend or relative uses the same password for every site, and then trying to get to them to install a package manager by uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux at the same time. Mixing together subjective personal preferences with objective technical advice just dilutes the latter to the point where it's impossible to find it compelling.
tuna74
Isn't custom accent colors implemented in the latest Gtk/libadwaita?
calliduspavonis
[dead]
mountainriver
This is peak nonsense
rbanffy
In the mid 2000's, I loved trying different themes. These days I just take whatever is the default for Gnome, which is remarkably sane, usually more comfortable than a Mac, and consistent.
Some themes solve real problems, especially for the visually impaired, but that's not the norm. It's a fun work of art, but the utility is always limited. More often than I like to admit, I was left with a broken desktop after attempting to uninstall a theme that didn't work well enough (or at all), and that couldn't be fixed by installing another on top of it.
There are more pressing issues in Gnome than to provide a stable theme API.
skerit
Gnome also made it _a lot_ harder to override the default Adwaita theme in libadwaita applications. Not impossible, just very annoying.
This happened together with a GTK UI redesign, turning it into yet another flat UI.
winrid
Still no icon preview in file picker though right? :)
alberth
Probably don't want to use the trademarked Apple logo and Finder icon in this theme (as seen in the top screenshot).
And I don't see exactly what's different in the "Default" -> "Majave" Nautlis style ...
But otherwise, the theme looks quiet nice.
InsideOutSanta
The difference is whether the sidebar ends below the tile bar, or goes through the title bar.
wk_end
It's so subtle it almost seems like parody.
runjake
Or the copyrighted Launchpad, Activity Monitor, App Store, Music, and Safari icons in the screenshot.
michaelmrose
Pretty easy to avoid copyright by making your own icons then you are left with trademark.
I'm honestly at that point not sure if there is an issue you aren't offering a confusingly similar product. Mac isn't offering an icon pack they merely have one. At least they don't appear to have ever gone after Macish icon themes legally.
bdcravens
Default the sidebar is full height
cf100clunk
LinuxScoop has been working on macOS-like themes for KDE, Gnome, and XFCE over the years and versions:
https://invidious.baczek.me/channel/UCNnUnr4gwyNmzx_Bbzvt29g...
Synaesthesia
I noticed Mac OS dock clones never use the same scaling method as Apple's. That's because they patented it!
comex
Huh, I never knew that.
But it looks like those patents have expired:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7434177B1/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8640045B2/en
(in any case, this particular theme uses exact copies of some Apple icons [albeit apparently redrawn], suggesting the author probably wasn’t worrying much about IP rights.)
michaelmrose
7. The computer system of claim 6, wherein said others of said plurality of tiles each has a left edge and a right edge located at distances d1 and d2 from said cursor, and is moved to a position such that said left edge has a distance d1 from said cursor and said right edge has a distance d2′ from said cursor wherein:
d 1 ′=S×sine(π÷2×d 1 ÷W)
d 2 ′=S×sine(π÷2×d 2 ÷W). 8. The computer system of claim 7, wherein said at least one of said plurality of tiles is scaled by a factor of:
1+(d2′−d1′)÷(d2−d1).
This is... not an invention.
Aurornis
This theme isn’t shy about copying various icons and bits from macOS, so I doubt that’s it.
acheong08
Surprising to see this up here. I used it for a few years and I do still believe Apple generally has better design than most gnome/kde themes. Gnome is unfortunately quite buggy and I've switched off since
prymitive
I think that the default Gnome theme is fantastic, unique and very elegant. It has nothing to be ashamed of even when compared to macOS look and feel.
amlib
Considering it used to look like this¹ it's no wonder why people (including me) were desperate to theme it. It took until the last two or so years for me to not care to do that because the default look and feel of gnome is now pretty good.
Still, I wished they offered some more adjustments rather than just a paltry selection of accent colors (you can't even select a specific color...)
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/gnome...
pjerem
I’m not the last to criticize (relatively, I respect the things I’ve got for free) Gnome but yes, aesthetically, I prefer Adwaita to macOS.
InMice
Sometimes I wonder what the desktop linux experience would be like if all the total effort put in was focused on the unification of userspace instead of endless fragmentation.
That said, I still respect this effort :)
hei-lima
I use it, and it's really very good and beautiful. However, I set everything to dark colors.
But there's something that really bothers me, and none of the fixes work: I can't get the cursor to work in GTK applications! It always switches to the default. It's not the theme's fault, as this happens with all the others...
I'll be honest my experiences with themes for Linux have been quite poor. Even with good ones it works for some apps but not others and you end up spending all your time fixing edge cases or just dealing with some windows not looking right.
My solution has been to just use the default Ubuntu theme that ships with Gnome. I find that theme just seems to work the best across most of my apps with a few small exceptions, compare this to other themes I've tried where only like half of the windows look right.
I'm sure there are better themes out there and I could achieve perfect consistency if I dug deep enough and tweaked enough things. But at least in my case I already spend many hours on my computer coding and something like desktop theming is super low on my list, it's one of those things I just need to work because I don't have time to be focusing on that crap.
The same goes for my desktop environment. I am well aware that Gnome is not the best and if I put it enough effort I could have a dream setup with XFCE or one of the many tiling window managers. But for me it just goes back to not having time, the thing I love about Gnome is that even though it may be more of a resource hog, it just f*king works.