Working primarily on Gnu/Linux and just moving to Windows occasionally, I felt a need to make the Windows XP desktop look like Gnome. There are two aspects to this, one is to change the icons and the other is to change the visual styles. Here is a step by step procedure for converting your desktop to Gnome.
Icons are an essential part of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) world. We will be using Tango Patcher, which currently includes implementations of the Tango icon theme, the Tangerine icon theme developed by the Ubuntu art team, Gnome-Icon-Theme2 and NLD10’s Industrial-Icon-Theme. Download the patcher and installing it just involves running the software.
The Patcher before installing gives you the option of the icon theme you want to install from the various ones mentioned above, I choose the default Tango Icon Theme, you can choose anything else. An option to change you Login Screen and BootUp screen is also available, choose it based on your liking. Then continue with the process, it will install and then reboot your system to be greeted with the new icons.
The next step is to change the visual styles, we will be using the clearlooks option, available as ClearLooks for Windows XP.
For visual styles to work we would generally need a software such as styleXP, but there exists an alternative to enable external themes support in WindowsXP, download and install Neowin UXTheme Multi-Patcher v4.0 (alternative link for download) (it applies a patch to the UXTheme.dll, to remove this just run the software again).
Next to install the Clearlooks themes head over ClearLooks for Windows XP or directly download by clicking here. Unzip the file and copy the folder to your themes folder, which is usually located at “C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\”.
Now go through your usual procedure which you use to change your Visual Styles (right click on desktop, choose appearance tab) and choose the ‘Clearlooks’ option. and Viola, now we have a desktop which closely resembles the Gnome environment. See a couple of screenshots below.
Hope you found this useful, do let me know your experience by commenting below.
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neat! will try this on my desktop machine sometime soon.
Sounds great. Nice stuff for linux lovers.
http://www.llbbl.com/data/nw_uxpatcher.zip gives a 404 error . Do you know of any alternatives?
Thanks.
@Swaroop: I just tried the link twice, the first time it worked, the second time it failed. Any ways it is also available here:
http://www.maxmomirror.com/mirror/nw/nw_uxpatcher.zip
Also, I will send you the file by email in any case.
Hey Nithin, A little googling had helped me find the file.
Thanks!
Swaroop
thank you for this post
finally something different from those vista/LH transformation packs 
i tried tango patcher along clearlooks, but when i start the computer, there is error showing …that goes away after cicking ok a couple of times.
and in the documentation i read that it does not support 64-bit versions of windows…am on XP…is that 64bit?
PS: i have a am 64 3000+ msi mobo machine
Thanks Nithin,
That is everything a Desktop theme should be: clean, simple and pleasure to look at. Good work.
Rob B
I tried it, it works great! Now, I need a hack to make the windows xp start menu look like gnome’s Applications/Places/System menus.
@ sindhu
If you have Windows XP 64bit, then you are on a 64 bit version of Windows XP
you see, XP is both 32 and 64 bit, depends on which version you get, it’s not Windows OR XP.. it’s Windows XP
I tried it and it is really great, good job, I always wanted a linux like look for XP now I have it. I made a slightly improovement, using Firefox, I added the Tango firefox theme and it is awesome.
Hi, I gnomed my Windows XP Pro following your instructions. The new interface is great! Thanks. With this new skin the system appears faster. Is it just an impression? Or is the new interface lighter than the original one?
Aww yea! Wish I would have stumbled on this sooner. Good work.
Couple more enhancements I found.
A Gnome theme for Thunderbird, but just for the 2.0 beta versions, and a Gnome skin for WinRar.
Awesome !
This EXACTLY what i was looking for my WinXP at work !
Thanks again
Awesome !
This EXACTLY what i was looking for my WinXP at work !
[...] Windows XP да изглежда като Gnome Posted by Dimitar Nikolov on Thursday, May 17th, [...]
great howto. thanks!
Thanks for that!
TBH, on the rare occasions that I do boot into XP I’m generally off in about three minutes… (yeah, I never use college computers) so I don’t really care about how it looks - the first error message tends to dispell any doubts I may have about the OS I’m on!
This is AWESOME thanks so much!!!!
Great! Finally I can use XP with (a bit) of joy.
UX patch does not work under XP SP3, use this instead: http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/SP3-UxTheme-Patcher-Download-98929.html
Guys, I think that google’ing for “UXtheme dll patch” will be better than asking questions around here…
And about “Xp look like GNOME”…
Try searching for “Human for Windows” on Net…
Human on Windows is the default Ubuntu Linux’s theme ported to Windows. (including Icons and Mouse and Bootsplash and Logon);
I think that it will be better if you will combine some stuff from this page with some stuff from Net like HfW…
P. S. I am not the spammer but I want to let people know about cool things…
P. P. S. Sorry for my bad English I’m Ukrainian;
Thanks - this is very helpful. I had to go back to XP for practical reasons but much preferred Gnome when using Ubuntu. Is there any similar method to making Vista look like Gnome? Googling ‘Vista Gnome’ brings up tuts on how to make Gnome look like Vista.
@Arp: I have not tried Vista, as I am using Linux much more so have not looked into it at all, but sooner or later someone should be posting a neat article for the same; after all there is no lack of people who would like the gnome experience on Vista.