I like my desktop to look pretty and be efficient at the same time.  As I have pointed out in my earlier post, I shifted from Gnome to KDE when KDE 4.2 was released. Gnome was fast and efficient but never pretty (no not even with the Shiki Themes). KDE 4.2+ is both fast (enough) and pretty. My only grudge has been that a few gtk applications that I still use (wicd, ephiphany etc) and Firefox do not integrate well with KDE.

A lot of blogs suggest that ‘gtk2-engines-qtcurve’ should be installed to make GTK applications look prettier. However that tip wasn’t good enough for me, I think the applications still looked quite ugly with the gtk qtcurve theme. However the Clearlooks theme which is part of the ‘gnome-themes-selected’ package did a better job than the qtcurve theme. Now wicd looks quite pretty and so does Firefox.

This is how you configure KDE to use the ClearLooks GTK theme

1) Install the gnome-themes-selected package for the ClearLooks theme. Open a terminal and paste the below command.

sudo aptitude install gnome-themes-selected

2) Then through either Krunner (KDE Run Command) or the KDE Start menu search box the string “GTK+ apperance”.

3) In the GTK+ Apperance settings windows, select any of the Clearlooks theme as the ‘Widget Style’

4) You might need to restart KDE if the applications do not start looking like the one below once you have selected the theme.

Please write in your comments which GTK themes do you use to make things look pretty in KDE.