There are lots of cursor, icon, window and GTK themes on the web and I downloaded some of them, but I do not know how to figure out if they are compatible with Ubuntu 14.04.1 64-bit Unity? Furthermore, in the beginning I used Ubuntu Tweak Tool to change the cursor, icon, window and GTK themes; however, I noticed that when I changed the cursor theme and hovered the cursor from one window to another its appearance changed. I was able to fix this by running the following command to set the cursor theme after setting it from Ubuntu Tweak Tool.

sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme



The output of the command was as follows: 



$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

There are 7 choices for the alternative x-cursor-theme (providing /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme).



  Selection    Path                                       Priority   Status

------------------------------------------------------------

  0            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme     100       auto mode

  1            /etc/X11/cursors/core.theme                 30        manual mode

  2            /etc/X11/cursors/handhelds.theme            20        manual mode

  3            /etc/X11/cursors/redglass.theme             20        manual mode

  4            /etc/X11/cursors/whiteglass.theme           20        manual mode

  5            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme     30        manual mode

  6            /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursor.theme     100       manual mode

* 7            /usr/share/icons/mac-cursors/cursor.theme   90        manual mode



Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

And this made me wonder where to put the cursor themes, why the priority of each one is different and what the manual vs. auto mode standed for. Moreover, I was not sure where to put the GTK or icon theme files and I preferred to put them under ~/.icons and I also have an unhidden ~/icons directory containing tar.gz versions of various themes together with a themes directory (also containing themes in tar.gz format) in my home folder. I do not remember as of now if I put them myself or the system created them. I would be grateful and appreciate it if someone could explain how update-alternatives work and where are the various themes stored usually? Also in my opinion Ubuntu Tweak Tool is not that successful at changing themes, is there an alternative for that?