ClearLooks to be Default Theme on Gnome 2.12

Eugenia writes "The Gnome Project announced today that the ClearLooks theme engine will be the default theme for the Gnome 2.12 (to be released around September). This was a much needed refresh of the Gnome default desktop (old theme, new theme screenshots)."

Allmost noone ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Uses the default theme anyway, that the beautiness of having themes, but for those that hasn't used gnome or gnu/linux at all, the first impression will be important ...

KDE made a good job choosing Keramik as the default theme, before that, they allways shipped the ugliest one.

ALMAFUERTE

Re:Wow

[Quattro Vezina]

Well, it looks somewhat like Plastik, but you can still tell it's GNOME because of all that ugly extra padding and spacing [sourceforge.net] they stick into all their buttons, listviews, and many other widgets.

It one of the main reasons why GNOME visually irks the hell out of me, regardless of the theme.

Re:Allmost noone ...

[Quattro Vezina]

The theme they used before Keramik (in versions 2.x and 3.0.x) was pretty good. I like it a lot, though I prefer the Light Style 2nd Revision widget style (NOT 3rd revision) and the Pale Gray colour scheme.

Keramik, on the other hand, was a massive mistake that seriously damaged KDE's reputation. I've heard on various boarda about how KDE looks like a hyperactive 12-year-old girl drew it. That's only half-true. Keramik looks like a hyperactive 12-year-old girl drew it. KDE can look incredibly good if you're not using Keramik, and it's a damn shame that Keramik is so ugly that it turns people off to KDE as a whole. I'm still pissed at whoever developer had the braindead idea of making Keramik the default style.

Plastik is a dramatic improvement on Keramik, but it's still a tad too flashy for my tastes, and the bloody huge window decorations are just a waste of space.

Less is definitely more.

[JPyObjC Dude]

Personally, I would vote for Gnome over KDE. Gnome's strict adherence to GUI standards where less is more will get them to a lot more usage in the future. KDE, although very feature friendly, is not nearly as refined as Gnome from a UI perspective and this will bite them in the ass as it has bit Microsoft.

When I look at the latest screenshots, I am blown away with the finite details that the UI designers have gone through. Most importantly, they seem to have stuck with the minimal real estate impact that I have come to love with OSX.

Real estate is where Microsoft have failed in the past with XP sytles and from what I have seen with their replacements, they are only getting worse with tons of real estate taken up by oversized and over spaced text on pretty but poorly contrasted backgrounds.

Keep up the good work Gnome ... You are the best bet for me to move to Linus or *bsd besides OSX.

JsD

Side bit - L&M of car manufacturers.
Honda (Apple)
- Less but works more but better
General Motors (Microsoft)
- More but works less and worse.

Re:Can't Gnome just die?

[Mornelithe]

And my reasoning for slow: What exactly you have here is Application on top of KDE lib on top of Qt lib on top of X11 lib on top of X11 server on top of Linux

Okay.

Windows? Application on Windows API on Win32 GUI on Win Kernel

Wrong. You left out MFC, or whatever equivalent overlay on top of the Windows API you're using. Most people don't program in the straight Windows API anymore, and even if they don't use MFC, they write their own wrapper around the Windows API.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of stuff in the KDE libs is just KDE standard widgets that aren't part of Qt. So it's more like kdelibs + Qt is one layer if you're developing KDE applications. It's just artificially split in some ways. It's a lot like how some widgets are in the Gnome libs, and others are in GTK+. In fact, I believe some widgets get pushed from Gnome libs into GTK+, because they are more generally useful.

The number of "layers" is irrelevant. For example, Qt can be split into a section that deals with GUI widgets, and a section that deals with making C++ programming nicer. If Trolltech chose to market them separately, would you call that two layers, and say that KDE must be even slower because of this?

By the way, was that your explanation of why you believe the slowness you have actually perceived is happening, or were you saying that "5 layers is too many, therefore it must be slow"? I'm unsure on that point. KDE isn't slow on my computer, and it's more than 3 years old (the computer, that is). What are you running it on?

Finally, I'm curious: What isn't integrated about KDE? And have you filed bugs/wishlists to alert the developers?

I knew it wouldn't take long...

[BrokenHalo]

... for the flames to get fanned back and forth between Gnome and KDE.

The whole point of themes is that you customise them to how YOU want them to look.

So if you think it's fugly, change it. :-)

I've been a big fan of Gnome since ~1997 and used to hate KDE with a passion, but recently as an experiment I took the time to customise a KDE desktop to look almost identical to my Gnome desktop, and found it actually wasn't that bad (in some respects superior to Gnome), so I actually now use KDE more often.

Re:rounded corners of the windows

[DaveJay]

I guess I'm a freak. I -like- the aliased corners, because it reminds me of an old mac desktop. For me, anti-aliased everything is just blurry and overrated -- I'll take crisp well-defined edges any day of the week.

Re:Allmost noone ...

[vrt3]

I don't understand why everybody seems to love Bitstream Vera. It doesn't look nice to me, though I can't explain exactly why. It's also less easily readable compared to, for example, Georgia. See this example [roelschroeven.net]: on the left is Bitstream Vera serif, on the right is Georgia, both the same size. Despite the Bitstream letters being larger than the Georgia ones, I find the text on the right *much* easier to read.

Of course, Bitstream is Free and Georgia is not, but that doesn't change the fact that I find Georgia much prettier.