It seems it's a rather common problem that GTK3 themes partly break Gnome3.8 by preventing having a nice desktop background while letting the file manager draw the background: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162204 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=161918 I've so far found only two (2!) GTK3 themes that work in this respect, the default theme Adwaita that ships with Gnome3.8 and Nokto3.8 (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=158033). I'm not particularly pleased with the aesthetics of either of them though. What's causing this behaviour in themes? (Hopefully it's easy to fix the broken themes I come across.) What other themes have you found that work properly? /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus