Create a glossy, minimalistic hacker-like themed Ubuntu

One of the biggest liberties of Ubuntu or any other linux distro is, as told nearly everywhere, the ability to modify or tweak nearly everything/ And this certainly includes your theme. A good theme can have much more benefits rather than imply looking 'good'. It can:

• Give you an aesthetic feeling of beauty and elegance to your Ubuntu, your digital companion. :)
• It can help you stay more focused, and professional.
• It can give you a sort of psychological boost to your mind, before you head into working.

Well, to sum up, a good theme can have many benefits. In this short tutorial, I mention how to create an elegant and minimalistic glossy black desktop using Unity interface. With slight modifications, it can work entirely for your Gnome 3 interface as well.

Here's are a few screenshots of my current desktop:

 Click on each one of them to get a larger view. The first one is simply two windows opened, my shell and the home folder of nautilus file manager. The second is a display of my wallpaper and the third is a display of Unity window-view interface.

So, lets get started.

At first, download the wallpaper and set it to your desktop, from here.

Next is that, you'll have to install the correct icon set. Here I have used Awoken icon theme, the white version.

For that, open your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy paste the following the following commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alecive/antigonesudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install awoken-icon-theme

Once they finish successfully, you need to install Ubuntu tweak or MyUnity to use them easily. Of course there are other ways, but using Ubuntu Tweak is simply the easiest. Install Ubuntu Tweak. Fire up your terminal again and enter:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppasudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

Once it is installed, open it. Go to Tweaks->Theme and change the icon theme to Awoken Icon Set White.

Now, you need to install the transparent Swar-black-base-green gtk theme. For that, open your terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/swar-themessudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install swar-black-base-green

Once done, return to Ubuntu tweak Tweaks->Theme and change  both GTK theme and Window theme to Swar Black Base Green. You're done. :)

If you don't like green-on-black, you can replace it with more colours if you like. You can similarly install the following colours too, on black. The syntax is the same, except the name of the colour:

sudo apt-get install swar-black-base-<colourname>

where <colourname> is to be replaced by blue, green, pink, purple, crimson, orange or yellow. Enjoy your new shiny and flashy desktop. :)

For an even more hacker-feeling, install guake, the drop-down terminal. Go to terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install guake

Now, run guake and remember that F12 invokes it, and F11 maximizes it. You can certainly change the stuff, if you like. Set guake to autostart with login, just go to Startup Applications and tick 'Guake'. Now you have your responsive hacker desktop, ready to work.