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File Locations

Use the following general overview to identify where to look for certain theme and configuration paths. Specific elements will be discussed in dedicated sections later on.

Themes

Location Purpose
~/.icons/* Icon themes and cursor themes. Only available to the user (1). Bad KDE/Qt compatibility.
~/.local/share/icons/* Icon themes and cursor themes. Only available to the user (1). Good KDE/Qt compatibility.
~/.themes/* GTK2/3, xfwm4, metacity, openbox themes. Only available to the user (1).
~/.local/share/themes/* GTK2/3, xfwm4, metacity, openbox themes. Only available to the user (1). Not properly supported by all environments, consider using ~/.themes/*.
/usr/share/icons/* Icon themes and cursor themes. System-wide.
/usr/share/themes/* GTK2/3, xfwm4, metacity, openbox themes. System-wide.
~/.local/share/lxqt/themes/* LXQt themes (panel et al.). Only available to the user.
/usr/share/lxqt/themes/* LXQt themes (panel et al.). System-wide.
~/.local/share/color-schemes/* KDE color schemes for Breeze et al., effectively copied into ~/.config/kdeglobals by KDE/Plasma when applied. Created/downloaded by and only available to the user.
/usr/share/color-schemes/* KDE color schemes for Breeze et al., effectively copied into ~/.config/kdeglobals by KDE/Plasma when applied. System-wide.
/usr/share/plymouth/themes/* Boot screen themes for Plymouth.
/usr/share/sddm/themes/ Login screen themes for the SDDM display manager.

(1) GTK and cursor themes only available to the user might not be displayed correctly by applications that elevate their rights to root with a password prompt (policykit), like gparted, synaptic etc. It is advised to store themes and icons system-wide. Also cursor themes might not correctly apply in some applications (e.g. Thunderbird) if they are not installed system-wide!

Configuration files

Location Purpose
~/.Xdefaults, ~/.Xresources Common X11 configuration file paths for setting some font and cursor settings. Loaded by some DMs and can be used with xrdb -merge directly.
~/.xsettingsd Default path for xsettingsd settings.
~/.config/xsettingsd/xsettingsd.conf xsettingsd configuration file generated and used by KDE/Plasma to sync its theme settings to GTK applications.
~/.gtkrc-2.0 GTK2 settings loaded by GTK2 applications if no XSETTINGS service (e.g. xsettingsd) is running.
~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini GTK3 settings loaded by GTK3 applications if no XSETTINGS service (e.g. xsettingsd) is running.
~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css GTK3 CSS overrides loaded by GTK3 applications.
~/.config/kdeglobals Contains various KDE/Plasma 5 settings and the active KDE color scheme.
~/.config/qt5ct/ Configuration path for qt5ct (see the qt5ct section).