Changing themes

One of the greatest aspects of Cinnamon is how customizable it is. Nearly every aspect of the environment can be changed, including (but not limited to) the colors of applications, desktop wallpaper, and even the theme of the Cinnamon interface itself.

To start customizing your environment, use the following steps:

The last section, Other settings, allows you to theme components other than Cinnamon. Unfortunately, there are no integrated means to download themes for other components like you can for Cinnamon. Although we'll cover installing new software in Chapter 6, Installing and Removing Software, you can find new themes in the Software Manager by simply searching for themes. The type of themes you're looking for are known as GTK themes, which set the themes for individual applications, and Metacity themes, which allow you to change the window borders of applications.

If you have downloaded additional GTK or Metacity themes, you can select them in the Other settings tab. To illustrate how different these themes can make applications appear, the following screenshots shows the screens before and after applying the theme. The following screenshot shows Nemo with the default Mint-X theme applied to it:

The following screenshot shows Nemo with a custom desktop theme applied to it:

In addition, the theme for the MDM display manager can be changed. As a reminder, the MDM is the login screen that you see when you first start your Mint computer. By default, there are quite a few themes for the MDM that you can choose. You can change the MDM theme by accessing the login screen section of System Settings. The following screenshot shows off this configuration menu: