I just upgraded to Cinnamon 2.0.14 on my LMDE laptop and in this new version I am unable to change the GTK engine used. Menus and widgets in general look very ugly:When they should look something like this:In principle, I should be able to change this using Cinnamon's own settings app in System Settings => Themes => Other Settings => Controls:However, while most options available in that window work (Window Borders for example), the Controls and Icons options are ignored. Starting from version 2.0, Cinnamon has become independent of Gnome and in fact conflicts with it. I have therefore had to remove Gnome to install this version of Cinnamon which may be relevant. I do have the necessary GTK packages installed though:$ dpkg -l | grep engines | grep gtk | awk '{printf %s  %-26s %-22s\n,$1,$2,$3}'ii  gtk2-engines:amd64         1:2.20.2-3            ii  gtk2-engines-aurora        1.5.1-3               ii  gtk2-engines-candido       0.9.1-pablo4          ii  gtk2-engines-magicchicken  1.1.1-9               ii  gtk2-engines-moblin        1.1.1-1.1             ii  gtk2-engines-murrine:amd64 0.98.1.1-5            ii  gtk2-engines-nodoka        0.7.0-1.2             ii  gtk2-engines-oxygen:amd64  1.3.3-2               ii  gtk2-engines-pixbuf:amd64  2.24.20-1             ii  gtk2-engines-wonderland    1.0-8                 ii  gtk2-engines-xfce          3.0.1-2               ii  gtk3-engines-oxygen:amd64  1.1.4-1               ii  gtk3-engines-unico:amd64   1.0.2-1        So, how can I choose the GTK engine used by Cinnamon to make my new desktop pretty?
How can I change the GTK engine on Cinnamon >= 2.0?
gtk;cinnamon
Most of these issues came because I was using a private repository linked to sid as described here. Turns out I had only upgraded part of cinnamon and its dependencies and my problems were fixed by pointing my sources.list to the Debian sid repos and runningsudo apt-get install gtk3-engines-*I can now change the appearance of my desktop as required. In the process, I came across a nifty little program called lxappearance that is similar to gtk-chtheme but gives more options. I highly recommend it, it is in the Debian repos and can be installed with sudo apt-get install lxappearance 