My Desktop - 12/8/2007

I liked one of the upholstery pictures from Thursday so well that I decided to build a desktop around it. This is the result:
Clean

Busy

Info & Links:
Wallpaper: Chair in My Apt Offices
Emerald Theme: Modified Beryl Default – I made the window shadows bigger and more orange, rounded the corners and changed the reds in the title bar to match the wallpaper better.
Controls Theme: Glider with yellow/green coloring to match wallpaper
Icon Theme: Suede
Cursor Theme: Lila - Black
Firefox Theme: Ubuntu Human
Thunderbird Theme: Default
XMMS Skin: Cathedral by regener8ted

This was an interesting challenge in several ways. Red is not a preferred color of mine so I had a concern about making something I could stare at for hours. Also, building a well integrated red desktop was remarkably difficult. While there are red emerald, controls, Firefox and cursor themes, getting them to match and appear like they belong together...is not so easy.

On a side note: I decided to modify the theme of my XP desktop at work. One, it sucks to look at the same thing every day for five years. Two, I was curious if XP allowed me to do some of the things I’d been doing in Ubuntu. When I had XP at home, I will admit that I didn’t try to get the most out of it. My assessment: XP does provide for a great deal more tweaking than I was aware of but it’s not as well done as Ubuntu. The lack of a color picker is a key deficiency. Also, XP had a tendency to bundle things I wanted to do separately and to separate things I wanted to do together. Both of these faults make it much more difficult to get a unified looking theme.