Chrome OS, a derivative of open source project Chromium OS, is a far-distant cousin of desktop Linux that has become more popular just recently.

Many Linux users admire Chromebooks from a distance for the facts that it is cheap, slick, lightweight and allows users to access to the command line. This post, however, is not about Chromebooks – but about a new theme with which you can change the look of your current desktop Linux environment in favor for that of Chrome OS, or at least close to it.

Chrome OS Theme for Linux

The theme is appropriately referred to as ChromeOS Theme and has support for a number of desktop environments, which are:

• xfce-notifyd theme
• Mutter theme
• Metacity theme
• GTK3 theme
• GTK2 theme
• Emerald theme
• Xfwm4 theme
• Unity support

There are presently no PPAs available for this theme so you have two options to install Chrome OS theme:

• to clone it from the Git repository (easier to update the theme later)
• to download the theme (no updates)

INSTALL CHROME OS THEME USING GIT

sudo apt-get install git
cd ~/.themes/
sudo git clone https://github.com/crutchcorn/chromeostheme

To update this theme later, you can use the commands below:

cd /usr/share/themes/chromeostheme
sudo git pull origin master

You can easily download the theme in zip format from here if you do not want to install git.

Once downloaded, extract it to ~/.themes directory.

INSTALL CHROME OS THEME WITHOUT GIT

You can use a tool like Unity Tweak Tool or GNOME Tweak Tool to set the newly installed theme in both cases.

This is what the theme looks like in Ubuntu 16.04 Unity:

Obviously the theme doesn’t blend in properly because no theme is incomplete without matching icons. You can go ahead to make your interface more Chrome OS-like by installing a matching icon set, using bottom launcher etc) – that will be on your own accord.