Xfce Forum

l3gi0n

Member

Registered: 2026-08-19

Posts: 2

Recommend top 5 complete and light themes for Xubuntu 26.04.

I am on Xubuntu 26.04. Dell Latitude 5175 2-in-1.

Specs:

• Intel Core m5-6Y57.

• Intel HD Graphics 515.

• 8GB of DDR3 RAM

• 80GB of SATA SSD.(Dual booting with Windows).

The theme I am looking for:

• Very lite. I want it to be snappy.

• I like a dark theme.

• GTK234 support.

• I don't want to change the icons and the cursors. everything else should be handled by the theme.

Blacklight

Banned

Registered: 2026-08-14

Posts: 40

Website

Re: Recommend top 5 complete and light themes for Xubuntu 26.04.

Adwaita is the best, materia is based on adwaita, but you have a wide range of choices

You basically can't beat adwaita no matter how hard you try (or adwaita-dark)

unless it's adwaita-dark-grey (that's a really good one, with grey highlighting instead of blue)

you've got catpuccin if you want an adventure in theming. they've stopped supporting gtk I believe, but they still have the relevant info for it on their github

catppuccin is super good. (frappe is the best, it's the lightest dark variant) and if you want a 'soothing pastel theme' theyre the best, and include instructions for theming the whole destop and all of it's different apps. (like dark solarized colors, but good looking)

https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin
https://github.com/catppuccin/gtk

https://github.com/catppuccin/cursors
https://github.com/catppuccin/papirus-folders

https://github.com/catppuccin/xfce4-terminal
https://github.com/catppuccin/firefox
https://github.com/catppuccin/dark-reader

and what you do for wallpapers, is make one with the base colors for frappe (the darkest: #232634) and you can make some with your accent color (Blue #8caaee Red #e78284 Mauve #ca9ee6)

(and transform wallpapers to match that background color + accent color + configure firefox following those instructions with the same colors + your terminal)

catppuccin will give u a complete desktop makeover, and you just have to follow those simple instructions on the page... might take you an hour maximum.

but so...

#1 Adwaita based themes (materia / adwaita-dark-grey)

the rest is user preference...

catppuccin (soothing pastel)

sweet-dark (lots of purple) https://github.com/EliverLara/Sweet (add sweet dark folders or beauty line)

whitesur (looks like mac) https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

materia (like adwaita, theres different derivative projects, suffers with fonts bigger than 10) https://github.com/nana-4/materia-theme

its actually hard to find a lot of the themes, because you cant search the xfce-look.org site. So Adwaita-dark-grey is like a super secret theme.

(sunrise gtk based on adwaita)
https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1258305/

(this might be the one here: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1368915/)
(it's called adwaita color variants)(those are premade themes)
(this is the source https://github.com/Gnostiphage/adwaita-color-gen)

(it's adwaita-dark-gray in the files)

You basically can't beat it no matter how hard you try, everything else is too non-neutral, adwaita-dark-gray is totally neutral, and matches everything perfectly, works with everything perfectly, it's the perfect theme after all

for bonus points you do: sudo apt install adwaita-qt

add QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=adwaita-dark -> /etc/environment

and when you reboot, qt apps will match your adwaita-dark theme

so just to reiterate just incase I wasn't clear enough: adwaita-dark-gray is the absolute best theme for xfce (can't beat it)

Last edited by Blacklight (2026-08-19 19:50:06)

Blacklight

Banned

Registered: 2026-08-14

Posts: 40

Website

Re: Recommend top 5 complete and light themes for Xubuntu 26.04.

i did git clone https://github.com/Gnostiphage/adwaita-color-gen/

it's in the generated/ folder it looks like source code but that's the theme

Last edited by Blacklight (2026-08-21 22:37:55)