How to make KDE Plasma look like Unity?

On Linux we have a great capacity to customize our systemto our liking, although in general terms, we have the ability to choose which distribution install, which kernel version to use and of course what kind of desktop environment use.

We are basically saying that Linux is a modular system, as we have the ability to choose between different components to customize the system to our liking.

If you are one of those users who have decided to change distribution due to the change that was made from Unity to Gnome Shell in the main Ubuntu branch.

If you are using KDE or you are a user of the environment, the day of today I come to share with you an excellent method to give it the look of Unity to your desktop.

With that we have the possibility to take advantage of what the visual appearance of Unity offers us powered by the full range of KDE customization.

For this we are going to use the most recent version of KDE which would be Plasma 5.12 even though any distribution with the Plasma 5.9 environment or higher can perform this customization in it.

Giving the look of Unity to KDE

To be able to transform Plasma into Unity vWe are going to use a utility that the desktop environment offers us.or from KDE.

We simply have to go to our application menu and search look and feel, you will see another tool if you use the search called "appearance explorer" but do not remember what it is Look and feel.

With this application we have the ability to set the wallpaper, panel layout, icon theme, window manager theme and everything else by installing a theme.

When we open the application we will see that there are some themes that are already preloaded to be able to change the appearance of our desktop with any of them, but we will not use any of these.

We are going to click on the button «Get new looks» where the download tool will open.

Being inside her let's search for the topic «United»When they have found it, just click on the "Install" button.

Download United theme

If you could not find the theme or you are from another computer different from yours, we also have the facility to download the theme, we just have to go to the following link To download it.

Once the download is done, we just have to place the theme in the following path:

~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme

You must remember that you have to unzip the file and place the main folder.

Once the download is done, we only have to look for the theme that we have just obtained among those that are already installed «United», select it and click on «Apply» to tell KDE to use it.

Icons for KDE

Already applied the theme we will get an appearance somewhat similar to Unity, but to be able to customize it more, we can install an icon packs to the system to improve the appearance of the environment.

There are many options for icons, but a good option for this situation is Ubuntu Flat Remix, They can download it from here.

To add the downloaded theme, we are simply going to create the icon folder in our personal folder with this command:

mkdir -p ~/.icons

And we are going to search with our favorite file manager for the newly created folder, it will be hidden, just press Ctrl + H to see the hidden files and folders and we will be able to see our icon folder where we will place the newly downloaded theme.

Adding Ubuntu Kwin

The KDE United theme works quite well with the Plasma / Unity theme, but for those looking for a more "Ubuntu-like" experience, we can add the Blender Ambiance theme.

For this in our applications menu we are going to look for «window decorations» within the application we are going to click on «Get new decorations».

A new window will open and we are going to look for the following «Blender Ambiance» among the themes we are going to find and install Blender Ambiance.

Once the theme is installed, we will simply go back to the list of already installed themes and select and apply the theme.