Use GTK style by default for KDE applications run under GNOME

[Sandro Mani]

Binary package hint: systemsettings

In KDE4, in systemsettings->appearance one can choose GTK as appearance style for widgets and controls. By doing this plus setting the correct colors / icon theme, one can achieve a near to perfect visual integration of KDE applications into GNOME. This could be automized by automatically generating the config files in .kde/config based on the user's settings. Furthermore one could also automatically sync bookmarks in the open/save dialogs.

As for the implementation, a background service monitoring any changes to GTK style/appearance would be needed which would update the config files automatically (what is the best way to monitor changes? Such events do not appear to be sent on dbus). The service should be able to revert to the default settings, either when disabled by the user or when the user has both kde and gnome installed and logs into KDE.

If this idea is something new and is big enough to become a blueprint, I'll setup a wiki page describing my idea in detail and proceed with the blueprint.

[Sandro Mani (sandromani)]

This does not apply to qt4-config, but to systemsettings in KDE, hence I don't think that this is a dupplicate.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Well, this really wouldn't be connected to either qtconfig for systemsettings. Ideally Ubuntu would install a default Qt configuration that sets the default Qt style and KDE icon theme.

[Sandro Mani (sandromani)]

But as far as I see, generic qt4 applications already use gtk+ by default (i.e. unetbootin, skype, mathematica, google earth - although sometimes one has to tweak these applications to use up-to-date system qt libraries for styling to work, but this is not something the distribution can control). What concerns KDE applications on the other hand is that they only look at the kde settings in .kde for information on how they should display, and I guess it would be quite a pain to make every KDE application fallback to the default qt options if they somehow figure out they do not run under a KDE desktop. So as far as I understand the mechanism for applications built for the K desktop the way to go would be to adapt the config files.

[Sergio Andres Vargas Trujillo (sergioandvar)]

Thanks by the answer, I appreciate your efforts to explain me the situation.