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). |