Appearance does not change on switching the theme

Question

If I select Radiance or Ambiance in the menu show in the following picture, my whole theme does not change. It only changes the title bar.

How can I resolve this problem? Or how can I reset the theme to default?

Answer 1

Install dconf-editor if you don't have it, and then go to

org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings

and check "active." One thing I've also noticed when this happens is that the media keys stop working: enable org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media keys. There also might be some more plugins you should enable.

Problem cause: when unity-greeter is run (by the lightdm --test-mode command in my case), it disables a lot of settings-daemon plugins that have to be manually reenabled.

I got all of my info from this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1861476

Answer 2

Removing the file ~/.config/dconf/user solves the problem.

PS: To reconstruct the problem I made the following steps: change in the file /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf the line

font-name=Ubuntu 11

to

font-name=Ubuntu 10

and after saving run the command

lightdm --test-mode 

That was all I modified yesterday. Now if you restart your session with CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE and login again, your theme is ugly (like mine on the screen shot in my question). Can anyone verify this?

Answer 3

Basically, here's what happened:

When you ran Unity Greeter, it started to really freak out, because its not supposed to be run as a normal user (although it is possible, I'll get into that in a moment).

To fix it, you need to go into dconf-editor (install the dconf-tools package), and then head to Org > gnome > settings-daemon > plugins, and then make sure that everything is enabled.

Log out and back in and you should be good to go!

To run Unity Greeter/lightDM in a window so you can take screenshots, run

unity-greeter --test-mode

or

lightdm --test-mode

Answer 4

I had the same problem after I ran unity-greeter in the terminal. From that moment on my theme did not load completely anymore. Only the title bar could be changed by selecting another theme.

Deleting config files, logging out, dconf-editor settings and so on did not work for me.

What solved the problem was to run /usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon in the terminal. All settings were instantly in place.

So, I added it to the 'startup items' and the problem was solved. Everything works fine now.

Answer 5

I faced the same problem. After lots of search I came to know that gtk 3.4.2 was the root of the problem. I installed it for my programming purposes. Even the above solutions were not working in my system. So I just uninstalled it and it started working just fine.

Answer 6

I ran into a similar problem on Ubuntu 14.04. I was unable to change my theme after restarting my computer. I could hack around the issue by logging out and logging back in. I noticed this problem shortly after installing Ubuntu and installing some programs and drivers.

Resetting unity solved the problem for me. I used the unity-tweak-tool to do this as unity --reset is no longer allowed:

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity

Edit The problem is back, this did not fix anything.

Answer 7

Have you tried logging out/logging back in? Typically on my install the theme switch does not complete until I do this.

It is curious that some of your desktop seems to revert back to the default GNOME theme, though.

Also, if this does not work, you may also want to try a reboot.

Answer 8

I had the same issue in Ubuntu 13.04. I just installed the gnome-tweak-tool and changed the current theme under theme menu. It solved this.

Answer 9

Try running:

    gksudo gedit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop

and then replacing the line:

    Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon

with:

    Exec=bash -c "sleep 5; /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon"

You might need to increase the sleep number. I got this from webupd8.