Comment 45 for bug 24280

I just modified a theme recently, and put my own version in ~/.themes. The day after, I discovered the issue with synaptic. I wanted to create a bug about it to help improve the distro on that little issue, and I'm amazed by the fact that it has been done 4 years before, and by the amount of misunderstandings in this thread, for a problem that in the end is not that complicated.

As a few posts point out, it is not just a bug, but a matter of architecture. Therefore I suppose the decision is to be taken by people with a high enough system view. I don't claim to be part of these. Anyway, since I'm here, I might as well express an opinion.

Clearly, the current situation just sucks. And using human theme by default instead of good old gtk default is definitely not an answer.

Suggestion : A solution could be to add a graphical way (a new button) in the theme manager, to allow a user to install a theme system-wide after entering his password. The theme would then be copied into /usr/share/themes.

This way, special users (the ones that use root privileges) would be able to have their favourite theme used when using root applications. And normal users would not be able to install themes globally but anyway they don't have to, they are not concerned.

And no need, then, for symlinks or /usr/share/themes permissions modification.

Incidentally, doing this would provide the admins with a nice GUI to manage the themes and install them globally. Which wouldn't be such a luxury considering the fact that quite a lot of users are using ubuntu on their own home desktop and therefore admins.

I believe this would respect current sudo philosophy. But again I may not have enough insight to judge.