How do I delete installed themes?

Question

I am new to Ubuntu and was excited by the freedom it gives. So I installed a lot of themes and a lot of icons.

Now I want to get rid of them. And I don't know where are they installed. In Windows, I usually knew where a particular thing is installed. And it had been easy to uninstall things.

I am not aware of where things go after installation. Deleting the folder that I unzipped and then run install.sh from, do not remove it. In which folder do I look at these things?

The same thing goes with software, once I install it. Removing the downloaded folder doesn't remove the software. My guess is that there is some place fixed where things go once I install them using the terminal as we don't specify their location in the terminal. What this location is?

Solution

Installed using the installation script provided by the theme

It depends on the installation script (e.g. the install.sh file) to where the files would be copied. Open the script with a text-editor and examine its content to find out. Usual directories are:

• Themes

  • /usr/share/themes/ (for a theme installed system-wide, i.e. with sudo)
  • ~/.themes/
  • ~/.local/share/themes/

• Icons

  • /usr/share/icons/ (for an icon pack installed system-wide, i.e. with sudo)
  • ~/.icons/
  • ~/.local/share/icons/

Installed using apt-get

You can remove them by simply running

sudo apt-get remove <theme-package-name>

Comments

[pomsky]

You can check the install.sh scripts to see where the files were copied to.

[rishabh jain]

What about those directly installed using terminal

[pomsky]

How did you install directly using terminal? Which exact command(s) did you run?

[rishabh jain]

Apt-get install xyz

[wjandrea]

Possible duplicate of How can I uninstall software? This answer covers install.sh.

[rishabh jain]

I moved to /usr/share/themes/ directory and tried deleting some themes that I installed and I could't

[pomsky]

@rishabh That's a system folder, you don't have the permission to modify its contents. You need to use sudo. See these: askubuntu.com/q/194129/480481 && askubuntu.com/q/600392/480481

[rishabh jain]

I installed too many themes, and I want to delete all and reset it to the default one. Should I delete all the folders in theme or one of these is the default one. I forgot which I installed and which were present there itself. One directory in theme is named default, should I remove all others except it?

[rishabh jain]

one folder is named default, can i delete all the folders except it?

[pomsky]

@rishabh No! The folder named "default" is most likely not the only pre-installed system theme. Ambiance, Radiance etc., if present, are most likely pre-installed themes. Only delete the ones you're absolutely certain about.

[rishabh jain]

oh thanks, I didn't deleted Ambiance,Adwaita, Default,Emacs,HighContrast,Radiance,Raleigh. I think I didn't installed them. Thanks for your help.