When comparing Arc vs Elegance Colors, the Slant community recommends Arc for most people. In the question“What are the best Gnome Shell themes?” Arc is ranked 1st while Elegance Colors is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Arc is:
Users will be able to match their gtk2 and gtk3 themes easily due to Arc supporting both.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Has both GTK2 and GTK 3 support
Users will be able to match their gtk2 and gtk3 themes easily due to Arc supporting both.
Pro Really clean and nice-looking
Pro Supports gnome-shell
Pro Customizable to dark or light themes
Pro Available firefox and chromium themes
There are matching themes for Firefox and Chromium for those that want to have a fully matched looking environment.
Pro Actively maintained
Actively maintained, support for it won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
Pro PPA for Ubuntu
There is a PPA available for Ubuntu users, which makes installing a breeze.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:satyajit-happy/themes
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-theme-elegance-colors
Pro Changes color
Elegance Colors can change it's Gnome Shell theme colors in accordance to the users GTK them, wallpaper or a user defined color.
Cons
Con Has some contrast issues
The theme is a low contrast theme so it really depends on the screen brightness if you see borders or the text, some elements don't even have borders - this makes the theme barely usable for portable devices.
Con Bleak font colors that cause eye strain
The font color in Arc and Arc-Darker is not black, but lightgray
after prolonged usage, it becomes apparent that this font color, combined with white backgrounds causes too much eye strain
Con Close button is not activated when cursor is moved to the top edge of the screen
The simplest of all ergonomic design principles is not followed.
Con Outdated
The theme project has been abandoned and there has been no activity for the past two years (the last commit was in May 2015).
Con More involved to set up than other themes
Users need to run a command to run a process in the background for the theme to work correctly, which may be more involved than what users are typically looking for in a theme.
Con Doesn't work
Doesn't install and doesn't work.