My customised desktop
I have always customised my computer to how I like it and it has changed over the years, but I think I finally settled into something that I like the most. I like when things are simple, and I like the old school look.
Programs
Everyone uses them, and you most likely use GTK and Qt programs. Maybe one or the other depending on if you use GNOME or KDE. I use a stand-alone window manager, and I tend to use programs from both toolkits. I want a blocky win95-style simple dark theme.
Qt
Using the Qt Configuration Utility (for example qt6ct) I choose Windows style with darker colour scheme. Easy. Dark, blocky, win95-style theme.
GTK
Now it's getting tricky. GTK2 was easy enough, but I do not have anything depending on that any more. GTK3 you can customise via the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file (or something like LXAppearance), but you might also need to set the gsetting org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme.
It gets trickier because if you use a stand-alone window manager, I need to use xsettingsd and set the theme there as well and now it can apply. At least I think so, because for GTK4 you apparently need to set the environmental variable GTK_THEME for it to apply, and if I look in gnome-tweaks (which I think is the frontend for gsettings) the option is described as “legacy applications”. So GTK theming is only for “legacy apps”.
What's a legacy app? It's known that GNOME doesn't want you to customise anything, so there may be “libadwaita apps”. Adwaita is the default GTK theme and that is forced on libadwaita apps as far as I understand. Anyway, for now it works, and I am using the Redmond97 SE Dusk Blue theme which has support for GTK4.
Icons
I want an old school non-flat icon theme so I use the classic Tango icon pack. This works perfectly for almost anything. GTK or Qt, except KDE programs for some reason. In Krusader or Ark, random icons are missing, but that's a project for another day to fix.
Cursor
Ironically, Adwaita default cursor is really good. It's based on DMZ which I wrote about in another blog post. But there's always been a cursor theme I've liked; Bluecurve. I can't find a good picture online so I took a screenshot here.
Window Manager
Finally, the window manager. Redmond97 includes an XFCE theme, but I use IceWM. It comes with a win95 theme which is very basic, but it looks like Windows 95/98, so I have made my own dark version of it. I might tweak it more in the future, maybe make the colours more in line with the Redmond97 SE dark colours.
Summary
That's it. That's how I have customised my desktop right now. I guess the only thing left is to share a picture of how it all looks together.
Here you can see pcmanfm-qt, a Qt program, and GIMP, a GTK3 program. meld, also GTK3, but with Client Side Decorations so the title bar doesn't follow my WM theme. Very ugly and terrible, this is why I avoid GTK programs.
Kwrite is also a Qt program and it has a cheat sheet on how to solve a 2×2 rubiks cube.
References
Here's a nice list summarising all the different themes.
- GTK theme: Redmond97 SE Dusk Blue
- Qt theme: Windows (darker)
- Icon theme: Tango
- Cursor theme: Bluecurve
- IceWM theme: win95-dark