Desktop themes determine the visual appearance of windows, panels, and applets. Desktop themes also determine the visual appearance of the GNOME-compliant interface items that appear on windows, panels, and applets, such as menus, icons, and buttons. Some of the desktop themes that are available in GNOME are designed for special accessibility needs. Users can choose a desktop theme from the Widget Theme tabbed section in the Theme preference tool.

Window frame themes determine the appearance of the frames around windows only. Users can choose a window frame theme from the Window Frames tabbed section in the Theme preference tool.