How To Get Dark GNOME Shell Menus And Dialogs On Ubuntu 19.10 With Yaru Theme

For Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine), the default Yaru theme pack has received some major changes. One of these changes is the usage of light menus and dialogs for the GNOME Shell theme (with a dark panel). In case you want to change the Ubuntu 19.10 Shell theme (Yaru) to use dark menus and dialogs, this article will explain how to do this.

I saw quite a few confused users so let me explain before continuing. The applications (GTK+) theme from the Tweaks app only changes the... applications theme, while the Shell theme is unaffected by this. So even though you switch the applications theme to say Yaru-dark, the Shell theme continues to use light menus and dialogs. What you need to change to have different GNOME Shell menus and dialogs is the GNOME Shell theme (step 2 from the instructions below will let you know how to do this).

There's a pull request (update: this is now merged) on the Yaru Github repository that brings support for installing both Yaru-light (default) and Yaru-dark Shell themes, allowing the user to change this from the Tweaks app (Appearance -> Shell). What's more, this also allows choosing Yaru (and its variants) from the GNOME Tweaks application even when using the Vanilla GNOME Shell extension, which was not possible previously.

It's not yet clear when or if this will land in Ubuntu 19.10, but those who want this right now can follow the instructions below to install the latest Yaru from this Git branch, and change the Shell theme. It's worth noting that using this, the GDM3 login / lock screen menus and dialogs will remain white, even after setting Yaru-dark as your Shell theme.

Also see: How To Use A Different GTK 3 Theme For Specific Applications. This should help in some cases in which you get a light menu with a dark UI app, for non-native applications like Sublime Text, Atom or VS Code.