By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
A silly little hack I devised this afternoon if you run Gnome 3 and have the pretty (but unused) Contacts icon in your Applications menu. Open this as root:
/usr/share/applications/mozilla-seamonkey.desktop
And replace this:
Exec=gnome-contacts
With this:
Exec=seamonkey -addressbook
One of these days I'll fulfill my dream of writing an entirely XUL desktop environment. And it'll use the Walnut theme by default. Oh, you'd better believe it.
Qt applications look acceptable in Gnome 3, but with the Qt4 Configure utility you can change the colours and fonts to match their GTK+ brethren!
This is a potential gotcha; depending on your distribution you may have to specify qt4, or not. For example, in Fedora:
# yum install qt-config
And FreeBSD:
# cd /usr/ports/misc/qt4-config
# make install clean
Once you've installed it, a beautifully large Qt4 Configure icon should appear in the "Other" category of your Gnome 3 Shell. Given many of my GTK+ applications still have crappy icons, having the Qt4 Configure app fit in so well was a pleasant surprise!
The default GTK+ theme for Qt looks passable, but Gnome 3 uses a whiter shade of pale. This is most noticeable between the title and menu bar in Qt applications.
You can correct this by clicking "Button Background" and "Window Background" under "Build Palette", and slotting in the following values:
To get the right shade of blue for selected menu items, click "Tune Palette..." under "Build Palette", then choose "Highlight" under "Central color roles". Slot in the following values:
I derived these colours from using the GColor2 utility, so they may be approximations. I can't tell the difference!
For better or worse, Gnome 3 uses Cantarell for its default font. To get Qt applications to match, set the font to "Cantarell" on the "Family" dropdown box under the "Fonts" tab.
Curiously, I had to go through this rigmarole on my Fedora 16 x86_64 tower, but on my MacBook Pro running Fedora 16 i686, Qt had the right colours set for Gnome 3 by default.
I've since discovered it has to do with installation order. If you install Qt4 Configure before any Qt applications such as VirtualBox, Amarok or Opera, the Gnome 3 colours will be included by default. Interesting!
I got some great feedback from people on my Gnome 3 review post, which in itself was a comment in a way. Is that GTK3+ Inception?
I tried to use GNOME 3 when I was utterly disappointed by Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. And after three days of trying it still felt very wrong to me and too many functions were missing. I ended doing the unthinkable (at least for me) and tried Kubuntu with their latest KDE desktop. I was completely shocked. Everyone was telling me before how bad KDE is and then I was finding out more and more how very wrong they were. After a couple of days of getting used to it and discovering different ways of doing things with KDE I actually find it even better than the good old GNOME 2. Looks like KDE will be a keeper for me.
That’s funny, I had the exact opposite response with KDE4 and Gnome3! I guess that’s one of the strengths of having multiple environments, each to their own :)
Nice review.
Wow, there is a lot of glitches there, and I got it when it hit testing.
Also, I usually don’t do this shameless plug thing here – but I wrote a review too if you want to read it. http://ignorance.kokidokom.net/2011/04/gnome-3-review/
A much better review than mine, and by a guy who also blogs random infocomm stuff laced with a solid dose of anime goodness. Or is it the other way round? Either way, his desktop background rocks.