Help an Old PC: Give KDE 3.5 the Oxygen Touch

[ Thanks to Prashanth for this link. ]

"What's the title supposed to mean? You will figure this out by the end of the article.

"I mentioned in my review of Kubuntu 10.04 Trinity that while the Trinity revival of KDE 3.5.11 has huge potential as a new contender in the field of DEs for old computers (competing with Xfce and LXDE, among others), KDE 3.5 looks pretty bad. Sure, it looks quite cool/cute when it first came out. That said, the KDE 3.5 developers themselves said that they benchmarked the speed and looks (and went over and above the stability of) Microsoft Windows XP when developing KDE 3.5. As a result, it is very fast, very stable (unlike Microsoft Windows XP), and bears more than a passing resemblance in its icon, panel, and window decoration themes to the latter. I haven't ever particularly cared for the default look of Microsoft Windows XP (and honestly, Microsoft Windows 7 is pretty good looking, making Microsoft Windows XP even worse to look at), and KDE 3.5 looks even more cartoonish (and this is exaggerated further with the KDE 4 looks).

"What does all this mean? If KDE 3.5 is here to stay, it needs at least a visual overhaul to stay competitive with other DEs optimized for low-resource environments."

Complete Story

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