Making Opera for Linux look like it’s using GTK
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
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