Tag: appearance

Make lightdm look better

In Debian 11 the default lightdm login screen had two visual flaws:

  • The infobar content on top of the screen was not properly centered.
  • The generic user icon was some faint white thing.

I edited /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf and added these two settings in the greeter section:

[greeter]
default-user-image=/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/apps/system-users.svg
indicators=~host;~spacer;~clock;~spacer;~power

For the icon to work the Tango icon theme is required. It is usually already installed. If not, run this:

sudo apt install tango-icon-theme

The icon looks like this:

Switch Debian 11 desktop-theme

I do not like the default Debian 11 “Homeworld“ desktop theme at all.

Here is how to switch back to “futurePrototype” the default theme of Debian 10, but without displaying “Debian 10” anywhere:

sudo update-alternatives --config desktop-theme

Pick the /usr/share/desktop-base/futureprototype-theme.

Then to ensure we use the “nologo” background for the login manager:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/share/images/desktop-base/login-background.svg desktop-login-background /usr/share/desktop-base/active-theme/login/background-nologo.svg 100

Now you should see background-nologo.svg as the activated option for the desktop-login-background:

sudo update-alternatives --config desktop-login-background

The desktop-theme change also affects the background image of the grub boot loader, so we need to run this:

sudo update-grub

The next time we boot the system we should see background images from the configured theme for

  • Grub boot screen
  • Login manager (for example lightdm)
  • Desktop (for example XFCE)