No offense intended, green is one of my favorite colors. However, I still prefer the classic look of Gnome 2 complete with orange coloring. (Click here to see a screenshot)
So in this tutorial I will attempt to show you how to replace Ubuntu MATE’s green theme with Ubuntu’s Orange theme in Ubuntu-Mate 18.04.1.
Everything changed in Ubuntu-Mate 18.04 which made it more dificult to replace Ubuntu MATE’s green theme with Ubuntu’s orange theme. The following instructions shows how I accomplished the task.
1. Install Ubuntu 18.04 themes
sudo apt install light-themes
2. Copy /usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE and /usr/share/themes/Ambiance to the Desktop
3. Next I copied the orange asset files from the Ambiance theme to the Ambiant-MATE theme.
However, there are files in Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets that are not needed in the Ambiant-MATE theme.
I wanted to remove these files, so I ran the following command to find all the unnecessary files in Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets (This step could be considered as optional, if you don’t mind having the unnecessary files in the assets folder).
diff -rq ~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-3.0/assets ~/Desktop/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets
After the unnecessary files are found and removed (if you decide to do so)
Replace the contents of ~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-3.0/assets with the contents of ~/Desktop/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets
Note: there should be 447 files in each assets folder when done.
Also replace check-selected.png and radio-selected.png in ~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-2.0/assets with files of the same name found in ~/Desktop/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets.
4. Then Replace #87A752 (Ubuntu MATE’s green) with #F17949 (Ubuntu’s Orange), in the following files:
~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-3.0/gtk-main.css
~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
5. Copy ~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE to: ~/.themes/Ambiant-MATE
cp ~/Desktop/Ambiant-MATE ~/.themes/Ambiant-MATE
Log out and back in to take affect.
6. To completely remove the green, including applications that run as root, rename /usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE to Ambiant-MATE-old. Then move The modified ~/.themes/Ambiant-MATE to /usr/share/themes/ and adjust permissions if necessary.
sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE
7. If you use Compiz as your window manager, open CompizConfig Settings Manager, and open the Grid plugin. Under the Appearance tab change the Preview Outine Color (#87A752) and the Preview Fill Color (#74FB00) to #F17949, and uncheck Use Desktop average color.
To remove green highlighting in Pluma you will need to change Pluma color scheme to Classic.
Note: In the end I compressed /usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE-old and deleted the original to stop some color conflicts I was experiencing with Mate’s theme manager. I also purged light-themes after all this as they do not work correctly with Ubuntu Mate.