Xfce Xfce4 - Themes and downloaded applications questions!

[l008com]

I'm been playing around with various desktop environments for freebsd and I think I like xfce4 the best. Just on its own, I like it the best. But it also has tons of themes available, many of which look really cool. Particularly the Mac System 7 theme, and the MacOS 8 theme, those look cool.

But i have yet to successfully install any themes! The install buttons on the web pages does nothing. The add button in the appearance program does nothing. Manually decompressing the theme archive and manually moving it to a specific folder on the system, either does nothing, or that folder doesn't exist.

What am I missing? I'm getting absolutely nowhere with this!

My second question is not theme specific at all, just in general. I'm a Mac user of I don't even know, lets just say 35 years. And I have plenty of experience using Windows too. But using these unix GUIs I still find many things confusing. Like when I download a new program via `pkg`, a program that is a GUI program, not just a command line program, where does it go? There doesn't appear to be an "Applications" folder. I don't see them in the "Applications" menu - although some I do. Firefox went right in there. I feel like just understanding how downloading GUI programs works will make this whole thing make a lot more sense to me?

 

[jwillia3]

Where are you attempting to install the themes?

If you haven't already, you should probably make a ~/.local directory that mirrors some of the structure of /usr/local. In this case, you'd put the extracted theme directory in ~/.local/share/themes.

Also, you must pay attention to the system that pages are written for. Generally they're for Linuxes that do not use /usr/local so when they say /usr/share, you need to use /usr/local/share.

Applications are not stored in packages like in Macintosh. The executable binaries are stored in /usr/local/bin, generally. The environment variable $PATH is the list of directories that are searched for executables. Support files generally go in /usr/local/share. General docs in /usr/local/share/docs and manpages in /usr/local/share/man. Libraries are stored in /usr/local/lib. C headers in /usr/local/include.

For any PACKAGE, pkg list PACKAGE lists the files installed by that package.

See hier(7) for more about UNIX filesystems' layouts.