Ambiant MATE Colours

This project generates colour variants for the Ambiant-MATE family, including:

• Ambiant-MATE-Dark
• Radiant-MATE

Status

Like Ambiant-MATE, this theme is not actively maintained and relies on community contributions.

The theme will be continued to be packaged for new Ubuntu releases.

Colours

Packages are made with the following pre-defined colours:

Aqua	Blue	Brown	Orange	Pink	Purple	Red	Teal	Yellow
#2DACD4	#5489CF	#965024	#E95420	#E231A3	#7E5BC5	#CE3A3A	#1CB39F	#DFCA25

Installation

Coloured themes can be obtained in a few ways:

• Ubuntu users can add the lah7/ambiant-mate PPA.
• Download a copy from the Releases page.
• Build one yourself

Ubuntu users can conveniently add the PPA like so:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lah7/ambiant-mate

Packages are split by colour, so installing ambiant-mate-colours-blue will give you the blue variants of the GTK and icon themes.

sudo apt install ambiant-mate-colours-blue

Want them all? That's roughly 35 MB download, 550 MB unpacked!

sudo apt install ambiant-mate-colours-all

After installing, themes/icons will be available from Appearance (Look & Feel).

To keep the size of the colour themes down, these colours depend on the original theme packages: ambiant-mate-gtk-themes and ambiant-mate-icon-themes (included in the PPA)

Via Ubuntu MATE Welcome

Previously, this project was known as ubuntu-mate-colours, which included recoloured wallpapers and a Plank theme.

Users running a release of Ubuntu MATE between 18.04 and 21.10 can conveniently access this feature via the Welcome application:

This adds the older lah7/ubuntu-mate-colours PPA, which is now discontinued. This feature is no longer accessible in 22.04 as Yaru-MATE now includes colour variants out of the box, and superceded this theme.

Snap Compatibility

In order for the theme to work in snapped applications, you will need to install the snap in addition:

sudo snap install ubuntu-mate-colours

Please note: The snap is no longer updated.

Then, "plug" this snap to all the other snaps:

for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-3-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} ubuntu-mate-colours:gtk-3-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-2-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} ubuntu-mate-colours:gtk-2-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:icon-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} ubuntu-mate-colours:icon-themes; done

To snap an individual application, such as Firefox:

sudo snap connect firefox:gtk-3-themes ubuntu-mate-colours:gtk-3-themes

This step may need to be repeated when installing new snaps to the system.

Please note that the snap only provides compatibility for snapped applications. It cannot be selected as the theme in MATE's Appearance settings.

Building

1. To begin, make sure you have a clone of this repository.

   git clone https://github.com/lah7/Ambiant-MATE-Colours
   

2. Install the dependencies:

   sudo apt install librsvg2-bin imagemagick
   

3. (Optional) Download a copy of Ambiant-MATE.

   Skip this step if you have the theme already installed on your system.

   git clone https://github.com/lah7/Ambiant-MATE
   

4. Use the script to generate your theme.

   The tool is entirely command line and parameter based. For usage:

   ./generate-ambiant-mate-colour.py --help
   

   To use the system's copy of Ambiant-MATE, use --src-dir /, otherwise, use --src-dir Ambiant-MATE/ that was created with git clone earlier.

   By default, the new theme will be created in ~/.themes and ~/.icons. If you use Compiz, this needs to be copied (as root) to /usr/share/ in order for window borders to work.

Tweaks

Ambiant-MATE/Radiant-MATE themes can optionally apply 'tweaks' to modify the themes even further:

Tweak Name	Theme	Description
mono-osd-icons	Ambiant/Radiant-MATE	Use monochrome icons for OSD volume pop up (#14)
black-selected-text	Ambiant/Radiant-MATE	The selected text colour is black instead of white (#21)
gtk3-classic	Ambiant/Radiant-MATE	Append treeview alternating styling for use with the gtk3-classic project.

These are passed as a comma separated parameter to --tweaks.

Packaging

A local package can be produced by running:

debuild -b

Note that this runs through the entire scripts/build.sh script, which takes a long time to process. A RAM disk is strongly recommended.

Packaging is not strictly required, a complete colour collection can be created like this:

scripts/build.sh
tar -cv usr/ | xz -z -9 > ubuntu-mate-colours-VERSION.tar.xz

Bonus: Wallpapers

Take your favourite Ubuntu MATE wallpaper and recolour it:

convert input.jpg -colorspace gray temp.jpg
convert temp.jpg -background white -fill 'YOUR_HEX_HERE' -tint 100 output.jpg

Users upgrading to 22.04 can re-download coloured wallpapers from this release (18.8 MB).

More tips can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md

License

This program is licensed under the GPLv3.

Ambiant-MATE is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.