I have used dark desktop themes for years, as I have found it more pleasant for my eyes. As it is with pretty much everything, I don’t stay with what is already provided by default, and ended up making the colour schemes of my own. I chose dark grey as the base colour, having bright grey for text and yellow/orange for highlight. Indeed, you might notice roughly similar colouring used on this site of mine. (:

Transition from KDE 3 to 4 made me to recreate the colour scheme, as the schemes from 3.x were incompatible with 4.x.

So, small tweaking back and forth over time had led me to have the following Dark Orange KDE colour scheme being in use as it is for a year or longer now. I’ve been using QtCurve widget style with these QtCurve widget style presets to go with DarkOrange colour scheme. Window decoration is another story.

And how do they look in action? Here’s few screenshots. (:

Konqueror on dark-orange colour scheme

Qt demos on dark orange

QtCurve settings dialog

I would gladly hear any improvement suggestions and other comments. (:

Kwin

KDE has it’s own powerful window manager, KWin. It’s full of features, and two new ones I mention here:

Window tabbing

KWin with tabs, using Tabstrip decoration

Now you can group windows to same frame, thus making them available in tabs, I find this useful when testing pages with several browsers, for example.

B2 has love

KWin B2 decoration config in KDE 4.4

I finally added the option to toggle on and off the auto-move of titlebar tab in B2 decoration, this decoration has come along a long time without new features (KDE 2?) so it was about time!. (:

It’s not perfect addition though, auto-move works only without composition, that is, effects and stuff, as there seems to be no any easy way to find out if titlebar is covered (obscured) when composition is used.

Nepomuk

Nepomuk is not new, but until this version, I hadn’t really touched it, now it is finally well integrated, works, and what important, uses resources moderately compared to its past (YMMV). Maybe it’s finally time to start using Nepomuk search instead of grep -r. (:

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What else? Oh, there’s plenty of things I should mention, including the always magnificient Plasma development, new Amarok releases (not KDE SC related) and many more, but I’ll leave that to others this time.

Back to scratch my itch…

edit: Forgot to mention, this also means KDE trunk is open for 4.5 development, hooray!