@terzag: Nearly half of themes i tried from gnome-look was not working with compiz.
About the archives - this is the problem of engrampa archiving. I used command
tar -czf MATEmbiance-Flat-Dark.tar.gz MATEmbiance-Flat-Dark
and it worked. So there are usable archives now.
@jaybo: I will try to make this theme eatable for compiz during next weak.
Did they actually include a Metacity part? A lot of themes are made for GNOME 3 and don't include parts that are useless on it. It's possible that Compiz is more strict with the interpretation of the index.theme: i.e. if a theme declares a non-existent Metacity part, it will work just fine with Marco (I assume it'll just keep the previously selected Metacity theme) but maybe Compiz will just not decorate the windows borders.
That's just an hypothesis out of the blue, I guess we would need to check the problematic themes more thoroughly to see what causes the issue.
@terzag @jaybo Ok. The problem is in the name. If it called metacity-theme-1.xml it works, but if metacity-theme-2.xml or metacity-theme-3.xml- does not. I will upload changes a little later. If you want yo can manually rename MATEmbiance-Flat-Dark/metacity-1/metacity-theme-2.xml to metacity-theme-1.xml and compiz will eat it 
Thatās interesting to know. Iāve seen themes that had various versions of Metacity but never looked much into this.
just a suggestion, could you change the orange checkboxes to a more MATE color, also the titlebars do not appear to be working unless you are just supposed to use the normal Ambiant MATE theme, otherwise I like it
If you mean window decorations - they work on my side. If you use compiz - just download themes again, i have updated them to work with compiz.
I like the colors of checkboxes. As for me - they fit to the color palette very well. Maybe later i will create a separate theme with mate color.
Iām not using compiz, and they still do not seem to be working
@Bernie - are you using Marco? I just noticed that the metacity folder has a metacity-2 xml file in it, which shouldnāt be supported in Marco (unless you build it yourself from master, I just added support up to metacity themes v3.6 a few weeks ago). The Marco in 18.04 should only support metacity v1 themes, so this may be a bit confusing.
@brokoli - which version of Marco are you testing this on? Have you tried using metacity v1 for your theme file? I can give this theme a try on Monday once Iām back in the office, but Iām running my own Marco build with a different theme versionā¦
I have renamed them already to metacity-1.
I have default Marco on 18.04 install.
Iām running Marco on 18.04 fully updated, I can check exact version if need
be
So I tried the latest version, it works, but I get the following error:
Other themes only show one Suru-mate-dark++
How did you install Suru-mate-dark++? It shouldnāt appear twice, so I suspect that there are two versions (one in /usr/share/icons and one in ~/.local/share/icons or ~/.icons) or two different themes (with different dirs) that have the same name declared in their index file.
./icons is empty
~/.local/share/icons only has hicolor
Now a few days ago I did mess up having Suru-mate-dark++ under both /usr/share/icons & /usr/share/themes. But I have cleaned that up and double checked prior to my last post. I will keep searching. I did make a back up prior to the numerous theme tweaks with an anticipation of restoring after my trial and error theme changing.
Also, slightly off topic, I like the Suru-mate-dark++ icon theme with the exception of a few items, primarily in the panels and a few icons. Is there any suggestions how to make these tweaks. For example, the firefox icon is grey, I would like to keep the orange. I like the network icon & animation form the Ubuntu mono dark. Just trying to get the best from both?
I am using metacity 1 or at least that is what the theme file has in it
1)Try to rename icon theme folder to Suru-mate-dark++.
2) If you do not want monochrome apps small icons - delete them from Suru-mate-dark++/apps/16
Does anybody else have problems with Metacity/Compiz decorations?
@Bernie, can you attach screenshot?
what are you wanting a screenshot of
Ok. I get what was wrong. When i renamed metacity theme xml file to be eatable by compiz it stoped to be eatable by metacity. And i did not get mistakes because it was cached on my side somehow, but when i tried to change window decorations and go back to the one from this theme - i could not do it. We need two files metacity-theme-1.xml and metacity-theme-2.xml with the same content. You could do it manually if you do not want to wait until i up;oad fixed version.
I restored my system, it seems the suru icon set was always there. My error discussed in post 31 is now gone. But MATEembience-Flat-Dark appears with a question mark. See below:
