When comparing Elegance Colors vs Solarized Dark, the Slant community recommends Solarized Dark for most people. In the question“What are the best Gnome Shell themes?” Solarized Dark is ranked 9th while Elegance Colors is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Solarized Dark is:
There are ready-made packages for Vim, IntelliJ, Emacs, iTerm, etc. If your app isn't supported the website explains clearly what colors are used, so it should be easy to wrap up your own.
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Pros
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.
Pro There are versions for a lot of applications or it's easy to make your own
There are ready-made packages for Vim, IntelliJ, Emacs, iTerm, etc. If your app isn't supported the website explains clearly what colors are used, so it should be easy to wrap up your own.
Pro It seems that is has been given the most thought
Judging from the description that has been given by the author, it seems that this color scheme has been designed with huge background knowledge about colors and relations between them.
Pro Works well with multiple fonts
Since Solarized has pretty good color separation it's easier to distinguish both thin and bold fonts.
Cons
Con Outdated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.
Con Too much blue
People caring about the color intensity in their screens, will notice that this theme is not useful for night use. If you use software like Flux to dim the blues in your screen this theme loses its enchant.
Con Low contrast
Comments for example, have very low contrast against the background which makes it harder to read.
Con Vanilla version doesn't work with htop
Half of the usernames in htop have the same color as the background.
One has to use a patched version of htop.