It might work with 4.2.4 but I haven’t tested it fully. The only downside I’m aware of is that the modern XFCE clock doesn’t exist in that version (since it’s XFCE 4.16 if I remember correctly), but there could be other small issues with Thunar, the CSS rules, or the new install script. If you really desire to put it on 4.2.4, I would test it on a different device or a virtual machine before you put it on your main system.
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nice touch with the estimated time component! Anytime i want to try something gimicky with qubes, I underestimate the task and I end up spending a lot more time than i expected
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haven’t read through it all, but sure as hell looks dope af.
Is it safe though?
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Only you can answer that question.
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Agreed. I encourage people to verify the shell scripts themselves. You shouldn’t trust me (some random guy on the internet) or the download site, especially if you require security tools like Qubes. That being said, in my opinion, the only viable attack vector would be the shell scripts. PNG/XPM/basic GTK CSS rendering is probably mature enough and the Qubes binaries have been heavily scrutinized so I doubt there are any crazy code execution exploits with copying to Dom0 and displaying the theme. Still though, it’s discouraged to move anything to Dom0 for a reason. You can complete the manual installation section if you don’t want to run the new install.sh script, although it’ll take longer. The other script, reload-theme.sh, is extremely basic so you should be able to review it easily. Thanks for your interest by the way, I appreciate it.
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@honu Hi. All icons on the panel work fine except for my sys‑vpns icons. This icons appear as white squares. Can you give me advice on how to style the sys‑vpns icons to look like Windows icons?
By the way, will you create a theme for Windows 11?)
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The post/thread above talks about the white background issue and how to find/fix it.
If your square is entirely white with nothing else, the issue might be that you didn’t replace the default network manager icons with the Qubes ones (in ./Qubes/Icons/SysNet/), which have a solid background. (It would be correctly drawing the Windows icons, but it’d be white on white and therefore impossible to see.) Read/reread the manual guide if you didn’t do this.
I don’t want to get too off topic into general theming/design advice, but here’s how I ported the symbolic Windows icons:
- Download the Seoge MDL2 font (Windows 10 design language icon font)
- Open in FontForge and use a script to export all glyphs to SVG icons
- Convert the desired SVG icon to a png, scale it down to 16x16 correctly and tweak the alpha channel for optimal sharpness/detail with antialiasing
- Use the SVG icon itself for 18px icons and up
- For Qubes VM tray icons, add the steps in the post linked above
Respectfully, I’m not going to make a Windows 11 theme or any other theme probably. I don’t like the Windows 11 design and I’ve spent enough time (months) doing tedious icon work, cursor work, dumping and converting assets from Windows, triple checking my work against reference images, and learning theming/GTK CSS from scratch to make this. I can’t see myself doing that again for something I won’t personally use. I also partially made this theme (the non-Qubes version) for my dad to use on his server as well. I’ve been purposefully over-explaining some Qubes theming details in case anyone wants to take up the torch, though.
If you need help with general design/theming which isn’t related to Qubes OS or the white box issue feel free to message me and I’ll try to help. If your icon problem doesn’t originate from network manager, message me details about what program/icon it is if you manage to locate it, and I’ll see if I can include a fix in the next version.
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FWIW, I showed this topic to my family members when it was first published a few months ago, and they were very impressed by the results like I was at the time. I do not have a use case for implementing this Windows 10 theme in my workflow, but I am confident any Windows user looking to migrate to Qubes OS will appreciate your hard work.
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Yoooo, this looks incredible, thank you so much 
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Glad to hear that. Thanks a lot.
Of course! Hope it’s helpful 
I just pushed a major update which adds a light mode variant alongside new light version Qubes XFWM4 themes. I also did a little bit of polishing as well. A new screenshot is attached to the original post.
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I recommend you to proudly resist windowsification. whatever DE comes with qubesos is what I and in my belief you should abide by. the only good windows is the windows at your home.
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off topic
if a bit of inconvenience is something that they cannot tolerate for the amount of security and privacy they would be receiving, let them stay in the win10.
i can spend hours on forums to fix just 1 problem but won’t give the m$ a single grain of my data. I can work with only 6gb of ram, with decades old hardware but won’t desist from the linux/BSD/Qubes type of operating systems and the FOSSware.
long gone are the days when the internet was at its wild west era ( i miss those times tbh) and even sharing your e-mail and opening a simple forum account was perceived with caution.
if only 25% of people had this iron mindset, then the tech corporations would have either changed their policies/or got banned a long time ago as public would demand an explanation. if 60 to 80% had it then they would have gone bankrupt.
the sole reason that tim’s, sundar’s, satya’s and duckerberg’s corporation exists is due to people acting dumb. those damn banana phones are no better than ungoogled android. sundar’s search engine is no better than ddg/startpage. satya’s OSbreaks down constantly compared to BSDs. duckerberg is not something I even want to talk about. that thing is a whole different threat to security and privacy.
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Happy Easter! I just updated the guide and published the last Qubes-related update to this theme (seriously this time, unless a future Qubes update breaks something or provides a new way to make stuff look even better). Here are the changes most relevant to Qubes:
- Added the requested constantly-tinted Qubes window border, made it look as decent as I could
- Added a 100% accurate “Show Desktop” button, which is no longer super wide
- Changed the Qubes CSS offsets to be accurate with the revised reload-theme script
- Fixed the virtual machine tooltips from having completely black borders
- Updated the installer to automatically apply the new VM and Dom0 CSS patches
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