Default button placement in Linux GUIs

[Peter Alcibiades]

Jacque wrote:

"Do Linux apps ever invent their own interface 
entirely, or do they tend to stick to one of the various distro 
conventions? (Would it matter, for example, if my answer dialog was 
bright pink and had its OK and Cancel buttons at the top?)"

Cautiously, because I'm not a developer and haven't used these things in 
anger, it seems to go like this.

You have several gui toolkits, of which the most used are GTK (gnome) and QT 
(Trolltech, used by KDE).  There is also FOX and one or two others.

If an app is written using one of these toolkits, its look and feel, icon 
shape and coloring and fonts, will be determined by what's available in the 
toolkit.  

In addition, both gnome and KDE have a control panel which allows the user to 
set the theme.  This will set the look and feel (icons, font, colors) of all 
the Gnome or KDE apps.  Independently.  You can run either control panel from 
either or any desktop.  For instance, I am using gnome right now on this 
machine, but in a previous time using KDE had set KDE to use the Sun theme - 
this was purple menu bars, a sort of dull blue background, and black 
highlighting.  It was fun for a while until the highlighting got irritating, 
so I fired up kcontrol while under gnome, reconfigured the desktop I was not 
running, and set the theme to platinum, at which point kmail running under 
gnome took on a dull metal, blue grey highlight theme.  Doing this left 
sylpheed and openoffice and firefox unchanged.

So, there is no distro look and feel, really, because you cannot as a user 
sensibly confine yourself to apps done in one tookit.  You might be deceived 
on this by looking at Ubuntu out of the box and the fairly restricted 
theme-set available in gnome.  There is not even, really, a KDE look and 
feel - there are quite a few depending on how one has themed it.

What Rev really ought to do is provide for a developer to pick up the the 
theme in use from either KDE or Gnome.  But what a rev developer should do 
for his/her app is, take a default theme, either KDE or Gnome.  Take a well 
behaved application like Gedit or Kate.  Then do something which is 
compatible.  And just accept the fact that for a lot of people using mostly 
apps from the other Desktop environment, yours will look like they are Gnome 
or KDE.  This does, alas, suggest not using pink!

The controls should be done similarly.  If you are picking a KDE style, follow 
the Kate control layout.  This stuff matters so little to me that I don't 
recall how different KDE and Gedit actually are in control placement.

Here is an OS News story on customizing KDE.  If you're a Mac user the extent 
of possible customization might be surprising.

http://osnews.com/story.php/16813/Tweaking-KDE-3.5.5

Here is their piece resulting in 300 reader desktops being submitted

http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=16844

Here is a link into available themes for different desktop environments

http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/57/

As you look through this stuff, the reaction might well be, why not pink?

Peter