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Is KDE 4.2 too shiny?

Posted in kde, opensuse by mschlander on 29/01/2009

Ever heard a beautiful woman, who also happens to be very intelligent, complain about not being taken seriously? KDE 4 seems to experience something similar. It appears that quite a lot of people simply can’t get past the sexy looks and appreciate the substance underneath (e.g. lots of powerful and highly configurable applications for users, excellent cross platform libraries and frameworks for developers, huge potential, great community.)

Since a lot of the KDE4 critics and the anti-eyecandy crowd in general care so much about how things look (do I have to point out the irony?), I thought I’d demonstrate how to make KDE 4.2 look like it’s ready to party like it’s 1999.

My KDE 4.2 before… My KDE 4.2 after…
bling 99

You can achieve the same in a couple of minutes, by following these simple steps:

  • Use Aya plasma theme (right click desktop -> appearance settings -> desktop theme
  • Folderview as your desktop activity (remove existing desktop widgets -> right click desktop -> appearance settings -> desktop acitivity type -> Folderview – this gives you traditional icons on the desktop)
  • Classic menu (right click menu icon -> switch to classic menu style)
  • Disable desktop effects (systemsetings -> desktop -> desktop effects)
  • Switch Qt widget style (systemsettings -> appearance -> style -> Windows – you might also want to consider Motif or Cleanlooks)
  • Switch windeco (systemsettings -> appearance Windows -> Redmond – kde2 or plastik might also be candidates)
  • Replace “Places” pane in Dolphin with Folder tree (press F9 -> press F7)
  • Switch to detailed view in Dolphin (Ctrl+2)
  • Disable taskbar tooltips and force tasks into two rows (right click taskbar -> uncheck “Show tooltips” -> check “Force row setting
  • Use a colour as background instead of an image (right click on desktop -> appearance settings -> Background image type -> Colour)

You can easily take it much further if you want, this is just a quick proof of concept. Maybe it’ll help some people to think more about the technology and less about the looks.

UPDATE: You might also find this tip useful: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/todays-tip-kdeskipargbvisuals.html

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