Customise Linux Mint - A New Look For A New You
Linux Mint is known for its user friendly interface and flexibility, but one of the best parts about using it, is how easily you can make it your own.
If you’re new to Linux Mint and want to give your desktop a personal touch, changing the themes, wallpaper and icons is a great place to start.
The post install wizard walks you through changing the theme, so in this guide, I will walk you through the simple steps to transform your icons and give your Linux Mint experience a fresh new look.
First things first. Where do you get icons from?
While you can find icon themes all over the internet, I’ve found this to be a good starting site - Linux Mint icons So head on over there and download something you like the look of. Download the file to your downloads folder.
Select a theme and click on download in the top right
Once you have some icons downloaded, the next thing we are going to do is prepare the file explorer, to make it easy for you to install the icons.
You can launch it by clicking the folder icon next to the Linux Mint menu in the bottom left corner or click on the Linux Mint Menu and its the 5th icon down on the left.
The File icon in the Mint Menu and on the task bar
Once you have a File window open (explorer if you’re from Windows or Finder if you’re from Mac), then you need to click on the View menu and choose Show Hidden Files.
This lets us see the hidden system folder that we need to copy the icons to.
You can tell if you have done it properly, as you will see a few folders with a “.” in front of the name, for example “.local”
Show hidden files turned on. The hidden files all have a “ . “ in the name
Now go to your downloads folder and extract your icons, just click on the archive file and in the window that opens, click on Extract. It should automatically extract it to your downloads folder and put it into it’s own folder.
The downloaded archives and the extracted files (Newaita-master)
Once you have that done, you can open a new file explorer window by clicking on the File menu and choosing New Window
In the new window that opens, select your Home folder
Next, click twice on the .local folder
Then click twice on the share folder
And last of all, click twice on the icons folder
This is the location we need to copy our icons files to.
So right now you should have two explorer windows open, one with your extracted icons in a folder and the second window, open on the location we are going to copy the files to.
The icons folder on the left and the downloads folder with the files on the right
All you need to do now, is drag the folder with your icons in it, into the window on the left, so I would drag the folder from the window on the right to the window on the left.
Once you have done that, you’re finished, you should have successfully installed the icons. Now we just need to activate them.
To do that, click on the Linux Mint menu in the left corner of your desktop and type Themes or scroll through the menu until you find it. Once you do, click on it to launch it.
The themes application in the menu
Once Themes launches, you should see this window
The Themes Window
Click on the folder on the right, next to where it says icons, then in the list that appears, look for the name of the folder that you copied in the previous steps. Once you find it, click on it and thats all there is to it, your icons should change!
No need to reboot and no terminal magic needed!
You can copy as many new icon files over as you need and have fun making your computer look the way you would like it to!
