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Just annotations of little "how to's", so I know I can find how to do something I've already done when I need to do it again, in case I don't remember anymore, which is not unlikely. Hopefully they can be useful to others, but I can't guarantee that it will work, or that it won't even make things worse.
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[rant] Linux seriously needs some efforts in theming standards/unification

Posted 07-08-2014 at 01:00 AM by the dsc
Tags rant

KDE, QT, GTK, TK, all in several versions and with changing variables and whatnot at every version, and even within a single version.

One would think that QT and KDE are more or less the same, but turns out that, at least from outside KDE, one can't fully define the theme settings (or UI font specifically) from KDE's "appearance" settings. Even for apps that aren't "standalone QT", but KDE! Like fonts on konqueror, and probably dolphin too. KDE has a longstanding problem with font names with spaces, it will often mess/ignore the font "type", like regular, italic, etc, if the font name is too long, or according to some pattern I didn't quite grasp totally. That forces one to manually edit the kdeglobals file. Which isn't that much of a hassle really, but it turns out that even doing that isn't enough to completely set up the fonts in some apps. You need to go on on qtconfig-qt4 and set it over there as well (or perhaps you could do just there). But it seems that QT is ditching qtconfig for QT5. So it seems that there's more theming trouble ahead.

Could try to make some pun with MLK's quote about "dreaming of a day", but speaking of "skins" in the sense of computer UI themes, but I wont. But I really dream that someday it will be more universal, perhaps the design/UI and the "inner workings", actual features could become progressively more disentangled, so the GUIs could be more or less like HTMLs/XMLs that users can fully customize. The functionality is in the "URLS"/"hrefs" or whatever.

Some browsers are/were somewhat like that. Firefox actually had or has a pretty much standard CSS that can, as it's expected from "CSS", define the style of the browser. I'm not so sure about UI aspects though. For UI aspects the Presto Opera used to be customizable to the point of becoming unrecognizable, only the icon would be the telltale sign. Konqueror also has some good degree of customizability. Unfortunately the former is gone and I fear for the future of the latter, since its not much appreciated as a web-browser and tragically underrated as a file manager.

Apparently browsers like UZBL have a somewhat openbox-like approach to the UI. I haven't had time to try to figure out yet, though.


(Great freedom of customizability and ease of uniformity. I'm not really asking for much, am I? Oh, and blazing-fast performance, bazillions of plugins, and it should also save RAM instead of fill it up. Bandwidth could also be actually wider than what your DSL service provides, as well. And people receive prizes for using it.)
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