How to enable Dark Mode on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Dark Mode, in essence, changes the color scheme of applications and user interfaces to a dark one, making them look less bright and gentler on the eyes that will reduce eye strain. It will also extend your battery life as it consumes less power to operate than the light mode. So, this article will teach you how you can enable the dark mode in your Ubuntu 20.04 OS.

How to enable dark mode on Ubuntu

To activate the dark mode, first, you need to go to the settings option. For that, you can either right-click on the top right of the screen to see the settings option or open the applications menu, then write settings in a search bar, and this option will also appear there. For better understanding, see the images below.

Click on the setting, and then you will see all the available options related to Ubuntu OS. But here, we will only discuss the dark mode, so you need to select the appearance tab where you will see that everything is in white by default, and to change it to dark color, you need to select the dark option as seen in the figure below.

However, the dark theme has not been implemented to the shell yet, and you can see this by right-clicking on the desktop tab that the color is still white. This mixture of dark app windows with the white shell isn’t bad either, but to get the whole dark theme experience, you need to install the GNOME Shell extension and GNOME tweaks tool.

For the gnome tweak tool, you need to type the following command in the terminal:

$ sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

And for extension:

$ sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions 

After that, you need to restart the system to apply the changes you have made using the above commands; then, you need to open the shell tweaks that you either do by pressing the windows button and then type tweaks in the search bar or by typing gnome-tweaks in the terminal.

Here you can see in the image below that the shell theme is disabled, and you cannot change it even though you have installed the gnome-shell extension and gnome tweaks tool.

So to enable this, you need to select the extension tab and then allow the user fonts option. After that, you need to close the tab and open it again. You can enable the “User fonts” as shown in the image below.

After opening the tweaks again, select the appearance tab, and now you will see that the shell theme is currently working. Click on it and then change the shell theme to “Yaru-dark,” which you can see in the image below.

After selecting this, you will notice that everything is in a dark color that was not dark before, like the calendar, right-click options, etc.

Conclusion

The dark mode is getting popular these days as it is more pleasant to the eyes, and you can work a lot better even in low light conditions or at night than the light mode. It also improves battery efficiency as it consumes less power. This article has taught you about the dark mode and how you can enable this.