 So I have always been a window manager only desktop Linux user. I have never run a full desktop environment the whole time I've been running desktop Linux, which has been about 13, 14 years now. And what makes this kind of unique is sometimes I take for granted some of the stuff that I know that maybe you guys that are new to running, telling window managers new to installing very minimal distributions like Arch Linux, for example. I'm getting questions and what I think are basic questions. But to be honest, I really haven't addressed them properly on video. And one of the questions I get asked often is people are installing Arch Linux for the first time and then they've thrown their favorite telling window manager i3 or awesome or X-mode add or whatever it happens to be onto this Arch Linux installation. And they're wondering, okay, now what? How do I theme my desktop? How do I set the GTK theme and the Qt theme, you know, the application themes? What program do I use? And this is a little tricky because honestly, you're probably going to need to install at least two programs to handle this. So there are two types of themes in Linux or two commonly used tool kits that people use to create themes. Of course, there is GTK and then there is Qt or Qt is actually how you're supposed to pronounce that. And GTK is probably the most common tool kit that people use as far as theming their application. So we'll start with that. Typically in a standalone window manager, what I use and what most people use to set their GTK themes is a program called LX appearance. So let me open a terminal. I'm going to zoom in here. What you guys on Arch need to do is you need to install LX appearance from the standard Arch repository. So you can use Pacman. So do a sudo and then Pacman dash capital S LX appearance. If I can spell it correctly. Now, while we're installing LX appearance, I would go ahead and install a package that will also let you change your Qt theme as well. And the package I use is Qt 5 CT and then hit enter. Give it, of course, your root password to do an installation. And I've already got both installed. So I will decline to reinstall. And let me close that terminal. So let me launch LX appearance here. I'll launch it from D menu. And this is LX appearance. And from here, you can see these are all the GTK themes that I actually have installed on my system at the moment right now. Looks like I'm using Arc dark. Now, one of the things when it comes to theming, people often ask me about themes. What theme am I using? And I typically don't even have an answer. I actually did not know my GTK theme was Arc dark because most of the time I spend in. The terminal or these days in Emacs, things that the GTK theme and the Qt theme really don't have much use for. So I really don't know what programs or what the theme that my programs are using. But there is PC man FM, which is a GTK based file manager. And that is the Arc dark theme. So and you can see me change the theme. Let me move my file manager off to the side here. And what I could do, we could try adaptive by hit apply. And now let me restart PC man FM and you can see we're now using the adaptive theme. I'm going to go back to the Arc dark theme because that is a blinding white theme. So I'm going to change that back to the dark theme, which I think I'm going to like a lot better. Yeah, that's much better. So that's LX appearance also from LX appearance other than the GTK theme. You can play with the system fonts, the default system fonts if you want to. You can play with some of the colors. You can set the icon theme. It looks like I've got a ton of icon themes installed. Most of these were pre installed on Arco Linux. I don't think I actually went and got any. I actually don't think I went and got any GTK themes or icon themes. These were just all that was on Arco when I installed it. You can also play with the mouse cursor theme as well from LX appearance. So that's LX appearance. Let me move to a different workspace here. And once again, show you guys that, you know, we've got that Arc dark GTK theme. So all of my programs should respect that all of my graphical programs that use the GTK toolkit. But the problem is there are some programs installed on my system and probably some programs installed on your system that are cute programs. For example, let me launch virtual box. I know virtual box for a fact is a cute program. And wow, that is white. That is blinding. Why does virtual box look like that? You know, my GTK programs look like this. You know, I've got this dark theme and then this light theme. And that really confuses the hell out of people because they don't understand why some programs look differently than other programs. The problem is again, it's using a different toolkit. This is a cute program virtual box is. Let's launch cute five CT. And this is that program again, cute five CT. It's the cute five configuration tool. And from here, we can change the theme looks like by default. It was set to breeze, which is a light theme. But if I wanted to, I could change that to a covantum dark or quantum dark. I'm assuming as you're supposed to pronounce it as quantum. I'm going to click apply, click OK. And now let's relaunch virtual box. And now I have a nice dark theme for virtual box. The other really neat thing about cute five CT, let me launch that again, is that other than just being able to play with the cute theme, you can of course play with the fonts play with the icon theme if you want to. But in the interface tab here, this is really neat because this is where you can change things like the double click interval. If you like double click. But one of the really neat things that I did not know was here until recently was this line here, mouse wheel scroll lines. The number of lines that your mouse wheel scrolls as you go down. So I was complaining the other day, I made a video about IM wheel, which is a command line utility that you can use to set the mouse scroll wheel speed. Because in certain applications, I found that the mouse scroll wheel was way too slow, specifically cute browser. Now cute browser is a cute application. So if you find the mouse wheel a little slow and things like cute browser, you can actually change the mouse scroll wheel lines, the number of lines that when you do a single kind of click of the mouse wheel, you know how fast that mouse wheel jumps down. Now I still like IM wheel and I'm still going to use IM wheel rather than cute five as far as mouse wheel scrolling because IM wheel lets you set it per application. This is global. This is all cute programs. This is affecting where IM wheel, you can set it specifically for each program and you can set the scroll speed differently for different programs. But that was just a couple of tools that you need to have installed. Again, this was QT5CT and the other one you need is LX Appearance. Make sure you have both of these installed and that should get you covered as far as the ability to change themes. Now themes themselves, you're going to have to go and install. What I would do is, those of you that are on ARCH, I would just go to the ARCH Linux package search on the website and search for GTK-theme. And then you can see some of the big GTK themes, the common ones that are in the ARCH core repositories, ADAPTA, ARC, DEEPEN, MATERIA. And if you wanted to, you could do ICON-theme as well because I know people are going to ask me about ICON themes and there's several again in the core repositories. If we looked in the AUR, you would find even more GTK themes and ICON themes in the AUR. Now I have my GTK theme and Qt theme set to different things. They're both dark themes, they don't look exactly the same and I know that bugs the hell out of some people. I'm just not that interested in theming and getting every pixel working right. But those of you that are, there is a page in the ARCH wiki called Uniform Look for Qt and GTK Applications and they explain some of the things you may be able to do to get your GTK apps and your Qt apps to look as similarly as possible. A lot of it has to do with the themes you use because some themes, some of the more popular themes have both GTK and Qt themes available and they've tried to make those themes look as close as possible. So I hope that answers some of the questions that I've had several people ask me about over the last several weeks and really several months because I know this is different, especially if all you've ever used was a full desktop environment. If all you've ever used was a distribution that automatically ships with GNOME or KDE Plasma or XFCE, you never had to think about any of this stuff because it's a full desktop environment, a full suite of apps and they include apps to set your GTK themes and your Qt themes and you don't have to worry about all of this but when you're building your desktop environment yourself and that's what you're doing. When you install a window manager, you're installing just a window manager but you have to make a desktop environment by adding all the extra parts and pieces so you need to go find a program to set your themes and you change your wallpaper and all of this extra stuff and again, the ones that I use for this and the ones I think most people use for standalone window managers, and Qt5CT. Now before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of the show, Apsi Dallas Gay Blue, Mitchell, Alan Akami, Arch 5530, Chuck David, the other David Dillon, Gregory Lewis, Paul Scott, Steven West and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode that you just watched, it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These guys, each and every one of these names you're seeing on the screen, these guys help support my work over on Patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. You'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.