Canta Is An Amazing Material Design GTK Theme

Canta is a complete Material Design theme. It uses pastel colors in a beautiful blend, with round buttons, tabs, and corners. Subtle, unobtrusive transparency is used sporadically, giving Canta a stylish look.

Canta GTK theme

The theme comes with 12 variants, including Dark and Light, for GTK+ 3 and GTK+ 2, and it supports multiple GTK-based desktop environments, including GNOME, Unity, Budgie, Pantheon, Xfce, and MATE.

Besides GTK+ 3 and GTK+ 2, Canta includes themes for:
  • Unity
  • Xfwm4
  • Metacity
  • GNOME Shell
  • icons

The theme even includes a wallpaper.

Based on Materia, another beautiful GNOME/GTK+ theme, Canta requires GTK+ 3.20 or newer, so it needs Ubuntu 17.10 or newer / Debian Stretch, and so on.

Canta theme screenshots (GNOME Shell)


Canta GTK theme

Canta GTK theme

Canta GTK theme

Canta GTK theme
Canta Dark 

Canta GTK theme
Canta Light

Download and install Canta theme


Download Canta theme.

To install the theme (for your user), extract the theme in your home folder, then navigate to the folder where you extracted it and run install.sh in a terminal:

cd Canta-theme*
./install.sh

For GTK+ 2, you'll need to install the Murrine and Pixbuf engines. In Debian, Linux Mint and Ubuntu, install them using the command below:

sudo apt install gtk2-engines-murrine gtk2-engines-pixbuf

If you plan to use the Canta icon theme, you'll need to install the Numix Circle icon theme. That's because Canta icon theme makes use of various icons from Numix Circle.

You can download Numix Circle icon theme from here. In Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you can install Numix Circle icon theme from its PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:numix/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install numix-icon-theme-circle

Now you can install the Canta icon theme. To do this, navigate to the src/icons/ folder from where you extracted the Canta theme and run installer.sh:

cd Canta-theme*/src/icons
./installer.sh

For how to change the GTK, icon or Shell theme in GNOME, see our previous article.