When comparing Elegance Colors vs Papirus, the Slant community recommends Papirus for most people. In the question“What are the best gtk3 themes?” Papirus is ranked 3rd while Elegance Colors is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Papirus is:
All icons look pleasing, especially with the Arc theme.
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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 Sharp, flat, and fresh
All icons look pleasing, especially with the Arc theme.
Pro Familiar
Used on Lubuntu and BunsenLabs, for example.
Pro Active development
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Con Outdated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 Under GNU GPL3
This limits the use elsewhere.
Con Contrast issues / No border around icons
It makes the the fast and makes it simple to add more icons(since you can simply scale them) however the contrast is lost in some situations.
Con No Ideas
It just copies the icon-syle from a different system.
Con Just another material style copy
Con Lacks icon for backintime
Backintime tray icon doesn't display on the panel because Papirus lacks the icon.