Pete's Odyssey

    A website and blog by Peter Lewis

Got my KDE desktop back!

After my little foray into the land of GNOME over the last month or so, I've finally got my KDE desktop back and pretty much configured on my home PC. Mmmm... hopefully without sounding too weird about it, this feels much better....

A few people have expressed dissatisfaction with the default KDE look, and I've always indicated that I tend to tweak the layout quite heavily. So, here's a screenshot of my current set-up.

There's nothing out of the ordinary KDE stuff going on here. But, for those unfamiliar, there are a couple of Konquerors (one in web-browsing mode with three tabs open, the other looking at some picture files), Amarok (the KDE music player) is in its xmms-style mode, and Yakuake (the quake-style terminal program) is rolled down and just visible at the top of the screen. I tend to have my Kicker (the taskbar thing) occupying the left border of the screen, which works much better in this day of widescreen monitors. There are a few other minimised windows on the current desktop, but nothing on the second. I have a few shortcut buttons, the K menu (depicted for a bit of fun by the gorilla guy) and then some other stuff, such as Kontact indicating how many emails I've got, sitting just above the clock and deleted items widget.

Anyway, so there we go. Perhaps a little boring for a blog post, but now we know. :-)

That's nothing like my KDE desktop at all! KDE as standard looks about as polished and sleek as Windows 98 i.e. not at all (although it crashes less!)

How much work does it take to get KDE looking like that?

Hardly any at all... takes about five minutes. I've got a colour scheme theme (available here), which you can download and import. The kicker thing and taskbar can easily be made transparent through their settings. Also, take a look on kde-look.org for loads more stuff including better icon sets.

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