So I was thinking about one particular thing that I wrote about in my review of the GNOME shell, when I said that you should drop the ideas you have about how a desktop should look.  This was how artificial the “desktop” concept is.  Back in the Stone Age we came from the desktop paradigm:  it’s what we understood in terms of productivity.  However, a computer is much different, much more powerful than a desk.  On a desk you have a finite space which contains only the information and objects you put on it.  It doesn’t fetch data, tell you anything, give you opinions or options.  It’s a tool.  A computer is different in that it has the power to fetch information, to move it, and to bring it all together and present it to the user.  It can handle any type of media:  where a desk could only handle text and photos (unless you put a boom-box on it) the computer can do text and photos and sound and video and social interaction through Twitter and other feed-based services.  We need to embrace a paradigm that suits the computer. Continue reading

For starters, throw away all your conceptions about desktops.  They no longer apply.

Also remember that I am reviewing a highly experimental piece of software.  It may look unwieldy but that’s because it has no customization options yet (or at least, no GUI).

And lastly, remember that because there is a whole new paradigm introduced here it may seem that GNOME Shell’s whole concept is flawed.  However, after playing with it I can safely say that I can’t wait for it to arrive and believe it will increase my productivity.

So what am I talking about?  This (click for full view).

GNOME Shell with Google Chrome in foreground

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Apparently I have become among the newest casualties in the Browser Wars II.  Firefox was running sluggishly and so I decided to give Opera – the speedy, powerful Scandinavian browser popular in Europe – a try again.  Before I switched to Ubuntu I was an avid Opera user before being a user of Google Chrome (which is still not available for Linux) but instead of building the browser’s interface with GTK like most other desktop apps, it uses the cross-platform QT toolkit.  By default, it looks really, really ugly in Ubuntu, especially when you’re running a dark theme like Dust.

However, with a little googling I found that using either a snapshot of Opera 9.6 or the alpha for Opera 10 you can bind QT4 (the version of QT used in the two builds) to GTK so that everything looks the same.

This was tested in Ubuntu 9.04.  It should work for other Debian-based distros or previous versions of Ubuntu, but no promises.

First, grab the DEB of Opera 10:

http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

Then install the required packages:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev build-essentials subversion

Aaannndd compile it:

svn co svn://labs.trolltech.com/svn/styles/gtkstyle
cd gtkstyle
qmake && make && sudo make install

There you have it!  To make all your QT apps – including Opera – using GTK, open up System -> Preferences -> QT 4 Settings and under the Appearance tab set the GUI (first thing in the tab) to GTK+.  Then open Opera.

Credits for discovering this go to king.pest at the Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=956329