Orchis theme: the installer defaults to a blue variant that the option list does not offer

The default colour is blue and blue is not in the list

The colour option is `-t, --theme`, and the readme describes it as accepting a comma separated list of variants drawn from `default`, `purple`, `pink`, `red`, `orange`, `yellow`, `green`, `teal`, `grey` and `all`, with a stated default of `blue`.

Blue is not one of the ten values in the list.

So either the default is a value the parser accepts but the documentation forgot to write down, or the documentation is out of date and the list has changed since the default was chosen. Either way, the one thing a user reads first, the default, cannot be selected from the values the same line offers.

There is a second inconsistency two lines down. The colour option `-c, --color` takes `standard`, `light` or `dark`, and its default is written as `All variants)s)`, with a closing bracket in the middle of the word. That is a stray character rather than a value, so the line tells you the default is all variants and then says something else.

By comparison the size option is coherent: `-s, --size` takes `standard` or `compact` and defaults to all variants, which is a sensible choice for an installer that compiles both.

The icon variant list stops halfway through its own brackets

The last option in the help output is the icon variant, and it is cut off.

The line reads `Specify icon variant(s) for shell panel activities button`, then the value list opens a bracket and stops after the word `default`. There is no closing bracket and no enumeration of what the other icon variants are.

The reason it stops is that the option applies to a specific piece of the desktop rather than the whole theme. It changes the shell panel activities button, which is the icon you click to see the overview in GNOME, so it is a per-variant choice that depends on your accent colour rather than a general theme setting.

What a reader gets from the visible text is that there is more than one icon variant, that one of them is called default, and no way to learn the rest.

The readme points at `./install.sh -h` for more information, which is where the full list would be. The embedded help block is a copy of that output, and the copy is what stopped updating.

Installing is one command and four flags you probably want to change

Manual installation is a single command:

./install.sh

With no flags it installs to `$HOME/.themes` under the theme name `Orchis`, which is what `-d` and `-n` default to. Passing a destination or a name is for people keeping more than one copy.

So the default behaviour of the whole project is: compile the SCSS with sassc, write a GTK theme into your home directory under a predictable name, and leave the colour at blue with all colour variants, all size variants and default icons.

The requirements explain why it is a script rather than a stylesheet download. GTK 3.20 or newer, either `gnome-themes-extra` or `gnome-themes-standard`, and the Murrine engine. The engine's package name is distribution specific, and the readme lists four: `gtk-engine-murrine` on Arch Linux, `gtk-murrine-engine` on Fedora, `gtk2-engine-murrine` on openSUSE, and `gtk2-engines-murrine` on Debian, Ubuntu and similar.

Then `sassc`, the build dependency, which is why the source is SCSS and the installation compiles it.

The libadwaita fix is a symlink and it costs you GNOME Tweaks

On GNOME Shell 42.0 and newer, libadwaita applications ignore a plain GTK theme installation. The readme's answer is a separate flag, `-l`, which links the selected Orchis gtk-4.0 theme into your home themes directory and then to `$HOME/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css`.

The cost is stated in the same sentence: it will not support changing the theme through GNOME Tweaks.

So the fix trades one convenience for another. You get libadwaita applications following the theme, and you give up the tool you would normally use to switch themes. Someone who changes themes often, or who uses GNOME Tweaks to manage several themes, will feel that more than someone who picks once.

The flag combines with the others, and the readme gives two examples.

./install.sh -c dark -l
./install.sh -c dark -t purple -l

The second example is also the fix for the colour list problem: naming a variant explicitly works, because the variants that are named in the list are the ones the parser recognises.

The Flatpak fix is two filesystem overrides and needs sudo

Sandboxed applications cannot read your theme configuration by default, so the readme gives a two-part override:

sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0 && sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0

Both paths are granted, so the same command covers GTK 3 and GTK 4 applications. The command runs with sudo because a Flatpak override is system wide rather than per user.

The readme's framing is that if you use Flatpak apps you can run this to fix the theme issue. It is the kind of instruction that is easy to skip and hard to diagnose afterwards, because the symptom is only that sandboxed applications look unthemed while everything else looks correct.

It is also the only command in the readme that needs elevated privileges, in a project whose normal install path writes into your home directory. That asymmetry is worth noting: the theme is per user, but the permission fix is per machine.

The repository is four shell scripts, an SCSS source tree and a release folder

The top level shows how the project is built. There is `install.sh` as the entry point, `core.sh` and `gtkrc.sh` beside it, `parse-sass.sh`, and a file called `gnome-theme-switcher`.

`parse-sass.sh` is the reason `sassc` is a listed requirement: the source in `src/` is SCSS and has to be compiled to CSS before it becomes a theme. The other three scripts are the shell of the installation, and the naming is descriptive enough that a reader can guess which does what.

Then the asset directories. `images/` and `wallpaper/` hold artwork, and `release/` is where the built theme appears to land before distribution.

The licence is GPL-3.0 in `COPYING`, which is worth noting for a theme derived from another theme, since the readme states it is based on nana-4, which is itself based on the materia-theme.

So this is a build-from-source theme rather than a downloadable archive of finished CSS, which is the single fact that most affects whether you can use it: you need a shell and sassc, not just a browser.

The releases are named after the day they were cut

The three most recent releases are tagged `2026-07-07`, `2025-04-25` and `2024-11-03`. They are calendar dates and nothing else, with no version numbers and no scheme.

That is a real versioning decision. There is no semantic version to compare, so nothing in the tag tells you whether a change is compatible or whether an upgrade needs work. The practical substitute is the date: a newer tag is a newer build, and the granularity is a day.

The gaps between them are also uneven. April 2025 to July 2026 is about fifteen months, and November 2024 to April 2025 is about six. A theme changes when the upstream toolkit or the design language changes rather than on a schedule, and the tag dates are the record of that.

The default branch is master, the last commit is dated 14 September 2026, and the repository is not archived. So there is a build from two months after the most recent release, which for a theme means a change in the SCSS sources that is not in any tagged archive.

Editorial conclusion

Use Orchis if you want a Material styled GTK theme and you are willing to compile it, since sassc is a build dependency and the scripts generate the CSS. Pass -t explicitly rather than relying on the default, because the colour the installer picks is not among the values its own help lists. On GNOME 42 or newer, read the libadwaita section first: the fix is a symlink, and the readme says plainly that a theme linked this way cannot be changed through GNOME Tweaks. If you use Flatpak, run the override command before judging the theme, since sandboxed apps will not see it otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. README
4. Releases
5. vinceliuice/Orchis-theme on GitHub