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December 27, 2009

Stop Gnome Applications from looking ugly in KDE4

Filed under: Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:28 AM

Since I have been using KDE (even in v3.5) I have noticed that Gnome applications look ugly in KDE. (see screenshot below) In KDE 3.5 I had to install the Gnome theme controller application and apply a theme and it fixed the issue. (I can’t recall the name right now, but it was something gnome-theme-something) but in KDE4 that didn’t work so well.


Firefox without GTK Themes

Did a little research and tried various options but none of them worked that well and caused loads of issues. Finally I found a way to get the applications to use the current GTK theme in KDE even after I rebooted the system without any manual intervention.

  • Open a shell prompt or open the Run dialog by pressing Alt-F2
  • Type gnome-settings-daemon and press enter
  • Once you do this all running GTK applications, as well as any more you launch, will switch to your GNOME theme and will look a lot nicer (See screenshot below)


    Firefox with GTK Themes

    As you can see the program looks a lot less ugly with the themes applied. However if you reboot the system without configuring the gnome-settings-daemon to auto start, the applications will go back to the default no-theme state.

    To set the daemon to autostart create a text file called theme.desktop (Actually This can be anything you want as long as you keep the .desktop extension) in the ~/.kde/Autostart directory with the following contents:

    [Desktop Entry]
    Exec=gnome-settings-daemon &
    Name=GNOME Settings Daemon
    Type=Service
    X-KDE-StartupNotify=false
    OnlyShowIn=KDE;

    Once you create the file and save it, KDE will start the Gnome settings daemon everytime it starts.

    Note: On some systems the autostart directory is located in the ~/.kde4/share/autostart folder.

    Hope this helps.

    Source of the tip: Tombuntu.com

    – Suramya

    1 Comment »

    1. […] few days ago I had posted that I figured out a way to stop Gnome Applications from looking ugly in KDE4. Turns out that my statement was not 100% […]

      Pingback by Suramya’s Blog » Problem with gnome Applications looking ugly in KDE4 continues — January 7, 2010 @ 1:53 AM

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