GTK theme

MATE preserves the GNOME 2 workflow, but it is not frozen GNOME 2 code. The desktop now uses GTK 3, Marco maintains Metacity-compatible decorations, and Wayland support is arriving component by component. Its theme model remains pleasantly legible: widgets, window borders, icons, cursors and panel layout are separate things. The three diagrams in this article... » read more

Cinnamon offers a traditional desktop, but its theme stack is not a single traditional GTK theme. The panel and menu are Cinnamon Shell, application controls are GTK, and window borders come from Muffin’s Metacity-compatible decorations. The Themes panel exposes all of them on one page, which is convenient until similarly named packages make it look... » read more

Xfce looks simple because it does not hide its modules. The same modularity explains its most common theme complaint: changing Appearance styles the applications but may leave the titlebars untouched. Xfwm4 draws those separately. Once that split is clear, Xfce is one of the easiest desktops to theme, back up and automate. The three diagrams... » read more