When comparing Elegance Colors vs viva, the Slant community recommends Elegance Colors for most people. In the question“What are the best Gnome Shell themes?” Elegance Colors is ranked 11th while viva is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Elegance Colors is:
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
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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 Available in Blue and Orange themes
viva offers a blue and an orange them so users can pick how the theme looks.
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Con Outdated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 Not finished
The them is not 100% finished yet, though the author does say he is working on it. Of course the latest commits can be seen on the github page with the last being from Sept. 2014.