Making Debian Look Like Xubuntu

If you prefer Debian over Ubuntu (and Ubuntu derivatives) but like the appearance of Xubuntu, then here’s some steps for making Xfce on Debian Wheezy look a lot more like Xubuntu. These steps are far from complete, but they make it look close enough to the default appearance of Xubuntu for me.

I’m going to assume you already have Xfce installed. I typically do this during the Debian install procedure but if you didn't do that you can still replace the default GNOME desktop environment with Xfce. Here’s a nice overview of how to do both. The key to the appearance of Xubuntu is the Greybird Xfce theme that it uses by default. I prefer to get the latest version directly from the Github repository of The Shimmer Project rather than relying on potentially older packaged versions.

First let's get the theme itself.
wget https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
su -c 'mv Greybird-master /usr/share/themes/'
rm master.zip


Now, let's get the Greybird icons.
wget https://github.com/shimmerproject/elementary-xfce/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
su -c 'mv elementary-xfce-master/* /usr/share/icons'
rm master.zip


The next step is to enable the theme. First go to Settings->Appearance and select 'Greybird-master' under the 'style' tab. Then under the ‘Icons’ tab select 'elementary Xfce dark'. Under the 'fonts' tab I typically enable anti-aliasing, set hinting to slight and set the sub-pixel order to RGB.

After doing this, you should be seeing a theme that looks similar to Xubuntu, but not quite. The next step is to go to Settings->Window Manager and under 'style' select 'Greybird-master'.

After doing this I find that my Debian installation looks close enough to Xubuntu for me, and certainly much better than the rather dated default Xfce theme.

screenshot
This was posted on Sat 19 Jul 2014 (4 years, 11 months ago) by Ryan McConville