Ever felt that GNOME and Ubuntu (as well as other distros) are a bit "conservative" when it comes to customization, more specifically, color accent/theme customization? You're not the first and probably not the last.

Even though I don't have a solid answer, I do have a recommendation and it's called Auto Accent Colour. It's a free and open-source GNOME Shell extension that automatically changes the system accent color based on the current desktop wallpaper's colors.

In short, it offers two main things: a bit of customization power, and a bit more convenience. Perfect for those who change their wallpapers often and are keen on having the whole system theme match the colors as closely as possible.

As mentioned before, the extension automatically changes the color changes when the wallpaper changes. This is, of course, its main feature, and I have found that it works while both changing the wallpaper from the Appearance menu and from GNOME's file manager (right-click the image file and select Set as Desktop Wallpaper).

There are two main modes: "Dominant" and "Highlight." These are basically two modes that offer two different types of background colors that are used to determine the shell accent. There's also a cache tab that lists the recent changes and a handy optional panel indicator with a manual refresh option (this option is also available in the top bar menu).

There are a few things you should know when installing this extension. The first one is that it "works out of the box for most backgrounds," as described by the project's GitHub repo page.

The second thing that you should know is that the app requires two important dependencies in order to work at its full potential. The first one is ImageMagick which has to be installed by the system's official package manager (please note that it needs to be version 7 or above).

The second dependency is rsvg-convert (and thankfully, there are a couple of hints in the extension's GUI on how you can install that).

When I first installed this extension I though that it was a bit finicky, but I have to admit that it works really well. I have a positive experience with it, and frankly, I enjoy the fact that it "just works." It may not be one those "top Bla-bla GNOME extensions" type of tool, but it's definitely worth checking out if you're a stickler cool wallpapers and perfectly matching system accents.

As usual, the extension can be installed from the official EGO website or, even easier, directly from the Extension Manager app.