What's your preferred theme?

[weekend warrior]

So, what combinations do you prefer?

Tell us what controls/window border/icons/fonts you like to use. Try to stay with names from Gnome-Look or Gnome Art if you can. Personally, I'm more of a dark-side minimalist. It's easier on the eyes. A few combos I like are:

gX/Glider/Human or Edge

Mist-Deep_plastik/Winter/Human

Mist-Solaris/Ana/Smokey Red

Warm Gorilla/Yatta Blues/Ximian South

For fonts usually Verdana bold 9


How about you?


PS to mods, I know this might sound like something for Art Talk but there's a reason I'm asking here - an idea for a setup interface.... bear with me :)

[fng]

pretty default here
i just swapped the default human theme for clearlooks.

[Psquared]

This is in Gnome:

for icons I use gartoon

for window border i use galaxy

for controls i use lush

my backdrop is sunset

[Lovechild]

My desktop is adored with Clearlooks and Bluecurve icons, the FC4 default - rock on!

[Xian]

Clearlooks-Etiquette / Human / Human

[pdk001]

i do like clearlook, too

[Rodrigo]

Icons: Gartoon

Controls: Mist

Border: Metabox

wallpaper: green or blue to contrast

[jerome bettis]

i use leech or d3a

[SparkyDawg]

For controls: Milk 2.0
Window border: Orange-rounded2
Icons: Gartoon!

[bored2k]

Windowborder: Openbox's LookClear
Controls: Clearlook
Icon: Default

or

Windowborder: Black Clearlooks
Controls: Clearlooks
Icons: Bluecurve

[poofyhairguy]

clearlooks

[jdodson]

clearlooks, clearlooks-olive, human.

default icon set.

background of the week(they rotate as i see fit).

[Kyral]

Window Border: MetaTivo
Controls: Glossy P
Icons: SphereCrystal

Pics in the Art Gallery :P

[Quest-Master]

d3a rocks. :D

[NeoChaosX]

Windowborder: Clearlooks
GTK: Clearlooks of some variation
Icons: Human

[kassetra]

Metacity: XFwm4
GTK: Humanity (mostly) but also sometimes Clearlooks-Chocolate/Clearlooks-Coffee
Icon: Humanity (but it's still green! doh!)

Backgrounds ... hmmm, I have a collection of over 500 of my favorite backgrounds - so that depends on mood (as well as backgrounds for nautilus and terminal windows as well.)

[Stormy Eyes]

I prefer to create my own themes when I can.

[Monchy]

skin: digitalharmony (http://www.users.monornet.hu/linux/index2.html)
icons: human
window border: digitalharmony

i don't think i'll ever change it since it goes with most wallpapers i like to use.

oh and i use the pinstripe firefox theme since it matches the skin nicely. :p

[SparkyDawg]

Currently I have Mist Khaos for controls, NeosWin2 for border and Gartoon icons.

It's a pretty cool combination of themes. Most came from Gnome Art.

[Spoofhound]

Clearlooks - plus my own backgrounds

[totalshredder]

I just stay with Human, it's a fine theme. I used clearlooks for a while, but I just like using human.

I also use the most awesome background ever (Attached). I got it from deviantart.com (best spot for backgrounds.)

Cheers,
Luke

[Ironi]

d3a back when I still used GTK themes.

[thorN]

I use the default ("Human") theme a lot- out of allegience to Ubuntu and because it's distinctive and consistently good in it's appearance.

Other times, it's clearlooks all the way, with a random selection of images as a background.

APoD (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) gives some excellent images, too.

[23meg]

i've looked all over art.gnome.org and gnome-look.org, yet can't find a single gtk2 theme that i find 100% usable except clearlooks. gperfection is excellent looking in general but it doesn't have some gtk2 items such as listboxes and some gnome toolbar items skinned, so they get the "default" appearance and look very ugly. thankfully i have xfce4 installed, and the Xfce-winter and Xfce-kolors themes are very good; they're all that i use. i'd install xfce just to get these themes even if i weren't going to use it at all; they're that good.

for metacity i like the following: h20ridium, hacked, milk-chrome, orbital, sloth. i don't use icon themes, i replace individual icons in the default set with those i like (some from icon themes, some from interfacelift.com) instead. my cursor theme is whiteglass (i like its transparency).

[drummer]

At the moment.. Industrial with eXperience3 window borders and d3a icons.

[sapo]

I use the Simple theme.

I dont like coloured stuff.. it burns my eyes [-X

[weekend warrior]

Very interesting.... as I suspected only a few are using the default theme. Hmm... what does that say? :-k ClearLooks seems to be pretty popular. A ClearLooks combo I like and use often is:

ClearLooks-Ice/Welcome Back (Ana variant)/garGANTuan 1.3/Won-Ton-Soup background from KDE.

Keep them coming :) it's insightful to see what we're all using.

[weekend warrior]

Right, not much activity here recently so I'll cut to the chase. What are your feelings on having a first-run theme selector? Some other distros have a nice, simple one and it works well. I remember particularly Mandrake 10 had a good start-up theme selector.

There are a couple of reasons for suggesting this. First, as we see here, very few of us are actually using the current default, suggesting that for many of us, it isn't as good as other themes available.

Secondly, and more importantly IMHO, in my experience introducing people to ubuntu the reaction to the default Human theme has been, well.... disappointing.

I've had comments like "ewww...that's pretty ugly" to the more graphic "ugh... that looks like :-# uhmm.... well they didn't say "chocolate" let's put it that way.

I think this is a terrible first impression to make on new users. Blue may be "out" but some people just don't react well to brown. Personally I use a brown theme (though not Human, but Warm Gorilla from my 1st post) fairly often but I do understand people's inital reaction to the default brown desktop.

I think it would be something very beneficial to have a choice on first bootup of 3 or 4 themes. There could also be a checkbox to continue running it on startup or not, as some people will like to have this choice each time, others won't. Yes it is fairly easy to change themes, but again it's about first impressions. As well, implementing this would not exclude Human, but simply present alternatives.

I believe this would serve our distro well when making a first impression on new users. I also think 3 or 4 themes could be selected that would be as distinctive as Human. I see nothing out of keeping or character with a "Forest Green" theme or a "Deep Russet" theme or the shade of yellow-brown on the banner of this forum for example. I aslo believe Kubuntu has proven that it is not necessary to rely on brown to bring the "(K)ubuntu experience" to the new user.

A first-run theme selector would be something small but very helpful to make a good first impression on new users and allow them to focus on the good things that ubuntu has to offer instead of thinking "yuck!... this looks like :-# "

Well there it is, what do you think?

[thorN]

I disagree. Having a prompt after you've installed would detract from the sense of simplicity - Ubuntu isn't a tweaky distro, it just works.

I think a lot of regular users will be using the regular theme. Some users won't even know anything about art.gnome.org. This means the results of this thread are very skewed towards those of us who have gone out of our way to make our borders pretty.

I don't think the argument against the colour brown is that strong. My friends (who, for the purpose of this argument, are image conscious teenagers) love how distinctive Ubuntu is - it's certainly not generic looking by default. It probably helps to market Ubuntu to the uninformed masses - it's often intriguing to someone who's only ever seen a Windows desktop.
(Although I hate the idea of thinking of 'marketing' linux, hopefully you see i don't mean it literally)

...My two pen'th.

[SparkyDawg]

I'm really happy with the current theme I have, which is very dark.

"Blue Carboon" for controls
Neos-Win2 for border
Etiquette for icons

That's with GNOME, I use Fluxbox a bit more often.

[weekend warrior]

Point taken on the simplicity thorN. That's very true, a simple install is one of the goals here. Though I still maintain that ubuntu gets more than its fair share of ugly name calling due to the default brown theme. It's good that image-minded teens like it, but I would be more concerned with those who are potentially turned off simply because of the way it looks by default. As you yourself said, these users may not know about GNOME-Look. Also a good point you had about this thread being potentially skewed because we do know about GNOME Art. Still is interesting to know we're all using - good ideas here for anyone needing a new look :)

[KiwiNZ]

Mine is the out of the box default , I never seem to get the time to change it :razz:

[gil-galad]

Its all about industrial.

[lusepuster]

Windowborders: Clearlooks.

Controls: Human

Icons: Human, with the Trash Can taken from the Etiquette icon set - I think the default Trash Can Icon is clumsy and ugly.

[a-nubi-s]

Hi, a newbie here. Can somebody give me a good explanation of theme engines? How do they relate to themes? How do I use them? What are differences? Do they each have different advantages? Thanks.

[kassetra]

Icon: Humanity (but it's still green! doh!)


Ok, I fixed humanity so that it's ubuntu reds, and no longer any green... :) But of course this leads me on to editing firefox themes as well... heh.

[kassetra]

Hi, a newbie here. Can somebody give me a good explanation of theme engines? How do they relate to themes? How do I use them? What are differences? Do they each have different advantages? Thanks.

The theme "engines" are external libraries that describe in detail the design of the widgets - like buttons, gradients, or other visual features, and gives control over the feel and overall look of a theme.

Then a theme is created for that engine in order to re-color it and possibly edit some of the theme engine settings.

[Xian]

Controls > Clearlooks-Etiquette
Window Border > Bluecurve
Icons > Human

[a-nubi-s]

Thanks Kassetra that helped. So for example I need the eXperience-engine if I want to use the eXperience theme right? After I download it where does it go and what do I do with it? Are the six engines at Gnome Art the only ones? Thanks again for the help.

[weekend warrior]

There's plenty of information on theme engines in this thread (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=11412)

HTH

[hard_i]

GTK: gPerfection
MCity: Office
Icons; gPerfection

[Stemp]

Windowborders: Clearlooks.
Controls: Ubuntu-World
Icons: garGANTuan
Gdm, Splash and Background : Ubuntu-World