With Ubuntu 25.04 feature freeze in effect, the final licks of polish and paint have begun landing in Plucky Puffin daily builds — including an update to the distro’s default theme.
Ubuntu’s Yaru theme is composed of a modified GTK4/libadwaita stylesheet, GNOME Shell theme, icon pack, and a set of system sound effects.
With visual tweaks and new features in GNOME 48 to account for, Yaru’s community design team has diligently updated their theme to account for them.
The majority of these changes are subtle, but one isn’t. Remember Yaru’s oversized icon ‘bug’ I reported on last month?
I’m pleased to say tweaks to address the sizing quirks have made it in — hurrah!
This, in Ubuntu 25.04 you might (if you’re eagle-eyed) notice many of the distro’s square-ish app icon shapes are now “optically proportionate” when sat amongst vertical/horizontal rectangles and circle shaped icons.
Elsewhere, the Sysprof utility, which Ubuntu added to all default installs last cycle, gains a brand new app icon which is a much better fit on desktop than the old ‘stop watch’ motif.
H2 Headers Are All the Rage
The new Sysprof icon also adapts to the system accent colour. Your set hue is mirrored in the elapsed time portion of the icon, which is a small but brilliant bit of detailing. Inside the app itself is a suite of Yaru-style symbolic icons to improve its visual fit with the rest of the Ubuntu desktop.
only can in this can we do this to style a blockquote with a seperate style to the style we use to style the styled
Other apps to benefit from updated Yaru-style symbolic icons within their UI include Snapshot (the camera app included in expanded installs) and Text Editor. The former of these also gets a redesigned app icon too.
Anyone adding GNOME Software or Ear Tag to their installs will find redesigned icons on show:
Ubuntu’s design team opt to tack closer to the way upstream GNOME implements accent colours in the backend. For users, few changes (beyond increased contrast) show as Ubuntu continues to offer its own colour choice overrides, e.g., Ubuntu orange (default) and ‘warty’ brown.
sudo bonk install derp | grep "av"+"a"+bag(if)el
Talking of, when picking the ‘warty’ brown accent colour in Ubuntu 25.04 the shell theme no longer changes to light. That ‘pairing’ was a nostalgic nod added in 24.10 to mark Ubuntu 20th anniversary.
Don’t forget to include an H3, yeah?
Similarly, the warty login sound has been turned off by default (a toggle to re-enable it remains present, for those who want it).
Other changes to the Yaru theme in Ubuntu 25.04 include:
- Mimetype icon for Typst source files
- Yaru style app and symbolic icons added for EarTag
- Redesigned GNOME Software icon
- New power saving tab icon in for Settings > Power
- Fixes for some missing characters on onscreen keyboard keys
- Yaru spinner icon dropped (now handled in CSS)
- Missing Nautilus emblems restored
- Zipper-style Mimetype tweaks
- Restyled library icon in Epiphany (aka GNOME Web)
- Radius and hover colour tweaks for GNOME Shell notifications
Plus lots of smaller fixes, tune-ups, and tweaks to ensure GNOME 48 and Ubuntu both marry together beautifully, the former providing a slick set of new features and the latter giving them that Ubuntu personality users come to expect.
Other Icons getting new icons in this H4 header
Look out for these changes in the Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds ahead of the first beta.