For the past couple months, I have been happily dual booting my iMac with OS X and Ubuntu for thanks to the rEFIt boot menu. Although last time I checked, updating to Leopard (which I’ve still yet to do ::sigh::) can cause some problems with the bootloader… not sure if those issues have all been ironed out yet.
I had used various flavors of Linux before, and was quite used to the normal GNOME desktop environment, so I wanted to try out something different. I gave Openbox a spin, and fell in love with its super minimal, clutter free feel. You start off with nothing but a blank desktop, not even a background, menu bar or anything. Everything you want to have you need to add yourself. After adding xcompmgr, a window compositing extension, to add some nice drop shadows to everything… I was quite happy with the result:
The only problem, was that the window-draw speed, for whatever reason – probably through some fault of my own I’m sure, wasn’t quite up-to-snuff. So I went back to using Compiz and GNOME.
As as side note, I really wish there was an application for OS X that is as customizable and cool as Conky (clock, system stats, etc in screenshot above). If anybody knows of one, please let me know.
And after trying to find a suitable theme for Metacity and GTK, I got to thinking about all the new theme ideas people have been tossing around for the next version of Ubuntu, 8.04. Some of which were cool and sleek, although still very brown. So I decided to make my own mockup of how I would want the OS to look… trying to keep the UI elements clean, consistent, and of course, useful…
Note: The icons used in the mockup are from the Crystal Project icon set.