LinLog

I've grown to love KDE. When I started using it, it was mostly for pragmatic reasons - integration and application coverage. My custom ROX desktop was great, but it was a patchwork of GTK+ applications sewn together with application directory wrappers, repackaging jobs, shell scripts, and symlinks. It worked for my purposes, but there was no unified look or feel and I was forced to add new applciations to the mix as the need arose. KDE handled all that for me, so I could do the work I wanted to instead of configuring my desktop (although I must admit that hacking on the desktop was a lot of fun for a while).

The main thing that has bothered me about KDE, though, is that I had trouble getting a look I like from it. There are a wealth of themes, styles, and icon sets on KDE-Look, but most of them suffer from the same problems as every other theme in the world: they're either ugly or they're pretty, but not functional. It seems like almost every theme I run across - not just for KDE, but for anything - either doesn't look good to me, or it looks nice but you can't read the text or figure out what the icons are supposed to be. After a while, I usually give up and just use the most boring stock theme available.

It looks like my days of lamenting are over, though, as I think I've finally found a combination I like for KDE. A few months back I discovered a nice widget style on KDE-Look called QtCurve. It's based on RedHat's BlueCurve and it has been perfect. Not only is it clean and simple, but the best part is that it comes with native themes for both GTK+ 1.2 and 2.x. I no longer have to mess with the GTK-Qt theme engine to imperfectly mimic my KDE theme - now I've got real themes that were designed to match. It has really improved my whole desktop experience.

I just now (meaning about an hour ago) discovered the second piece of the puzzle - an icon theme, Nuvola. Up until now, I had been using the KDE-classic theme, which is OK, but a bit dated and not particularly attractive. All the other themes I'd tried suffered from trying to be too pretty, meaning the icons looked great, but you couldn't tell what they were supposed to be. Nuvola manages to have icons which, for the most part, are recognizable while keeping the cartoonishness to a minimum. It's kind of reminiscient of the Crystal SVG theme and has the added benefit of working well with it, but somehow it just feels a bit sharper. I don't know what it is, but for some reason, Crystal SVG always felt a little washed out to me. Hopefully I'll be happier with Nuvola. Only time will tell.