Bring back distro-wide themes!

[liam_on_linux]

Someone on Reddit was asking about the Bluecurve theme on Red Hat Linux.

Back then, Red Hat Linux only offered KDE and GNOME, I think. The great thing about Bluecurve was that they looked the same and both of them had the Red Hat look.

Not any more. In recent years I've tried GNOME, Xfce, MATE, KDE, Cinnamon, and LXQt on Fedora.

They all look different. They may have some wallpaper in common but that's it. In any of them, there's no way you can glance from across a room (meaning, too far away to read any text or see any logos) and go "oh, yeah, that's Fedora."

And on openSUSE, I tried all of them plus LXDE and IceWM. Same thing. Wallpaper at best.

Same on Ubuntu: I regularly try all the main flavours, as I did here and they all look different. MATE makes an effort, Unity has some of the wallpapers, but that's about it.

If a vendor or project has one corporate brand and one corporate look, usually, time and money and effort went into it. Into logos, colours, tints, gradients, wallpaper, all that stuff.

It seems to me that the least the maintainers of different desktop flavours or spins could do is adopt the official theme and make their remixes look like they are the same OS from the same vendor.

I like Xfce. Its themes aren't great. Many, most, make window borders so thin you can't grab them to resize. Budgie is OK and looks colourful, but Ubuntu Budgie does not look like Ubuntu.

Kubuntu looks like Fedora KDE looks like Debian with KDE looks like anything with KDE, and to my eyes, KDE's themes are horrible, as they have been since KDE 1 -- yes I used 1.0, and liked it -- and only 3rd party distro vendor themes ever made KDE look good.

Only 2 of them, really: Red Hat Linux with Bluecurve, and Corel LinuxOS and Xandros.

Everyone else's KDE skins are horrible. All of them. It's one reason I can't use KDE now. It almost hurts my eyes. (Same goes for TDE BTW.) It is nasty.

Branding matters. Distros all ignore it now. They shouldn't.

And someone somewhere should bring back Bluecurve, or failing that, port GNOME's Adwaita to all the other desktops. I can't stand GNOME but its themes and appearance are the best distro in the West. (Some of the Chinese ones like Deepin and Kylin are beautiful, but everyone's afraid they're full of spyware for the Chinese Communist Party... and they might be right.)