How do I change gnome 3.4 theme? [Solved]

[shmaleb]

I downloaded the user themes extension from the official site and followed the instructions to make advanced settings not crash but now it still shows an exclamation mark by the gnome shell themes and wont let me choose one.

[shmaleb]

Fixed
followed the instructions at http://askubuntu.com/questions/74218/ho ... e-manually

After you downloaded the theme, unzip it to "/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme". Then you can reload gnome-shell by ALT+F2 and typing gnome-shell --replace Or just log out and back in again.

Sidenote: its the contents of the folder you unzipped that go in /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme not the folder itself.

[micia]

Keep in mind that installing manually packages, outside of the official package manager, is dangerous and unsupported, other than that, it's good that you fixed your issue

[shmaleb]

Keep in mind that installing manually packages, outside of the official package manager, is dangerous and unsupported, other than that, it's good that you fixed your issue

I really cant see anything going wrong. If you are really scared just back up the directory, It's not really a "Package" per se, its just a little visual mod,

[micia]

There are many things that could go wrong, for example the package manager overriding those files if another package installs its stuff there (even if, in the particular case of entropy and portage, they should check for file conflicts), or the package manager leaving those files behind if one day you are going to remove GNOME shell, or you needing to manually update those files if needed in the future, and so on....
It is a package, since those files could be provided by a package already in the repository, thus it makes this practice dangerous and it must be pointed out.
That being said, if you know what you are doing and want to take the risk, since you think it is negligible, you can do it, it is your computer

[shmaleb]

Why would another package install stuff there? unless it was a gnome shell themes package in which case you would know to restore the directory. If I wanted to remove gnome shell (and I'd be crazy to) than I would delete the entire directory, right? And seriously dude I think you're looking to far into it, it's just a simple completely reversible visual mod, it won't make the computer spontaneously combust. And also as a side note it's not really my computer, it was one my dad bought a long time ago but it broke and a while ago I fixed it but he still retains legal ownership.

[micia]

I am just stating that there are risks doing that, and there surely are, as I said, you are free to do whatever you want, but you are basically doing stuff on the package manager's back. Since the package manager is the one that should manage your system it could do anything it feels necessary with that directory.

All the manual work you are talking about should be done by the package manager itself, not by the user, that's why this practice is unsupported and error prone, in this case it might not make your computer combust, but it might very well make the themes you installed spontaneously disappear after an update, or spontaneously become incompatible with your installed version of GNOME shell.

I am not looking too much into it, I am just trying to make whoever reads this post (and possibly you yourself) aware that this practice is not supported by Sabayon and, whether in this particular case is dangerous or not, it might lead to serious issues sometimes.

A safer procedure would be to install the theme in your user's home directory (home directories are not managed by the package manager and are considered sacred), I suspect there is a way to install the theme there, there should be a .local/share/gnome-shell/themes in the user home directory, or maybe using the .themes folder by enabling the gnome-user-themes extension.