Recently a big step towards a unified KDE interface occurred- the oxygen-gtk project. Rather than the imperfect solution of theming where a GTK theme that approximates the KDE Oxygen look is made, this project is an actual GTK engine that will dynamically and perfectly render a KDE interface on a GTK app. Yay! It’s not perfect but it ships in openSUSE 11.4 by default. I can’t say it’s perfect- several apps have a white box in the background of the app where oxygen-gtk appears to be failing to render the Oxygen radial background. Update: The white rectangle is caused by a bug in Cairo + Nvidia’s proprietary driver. If you switch to the Nouveau driver, the white rectangle is gone. There’s also a patch for Cairo if you’d rather keep the Nvidia display driver and can’t wait. Update 2: Cairo’s been updated in openSUSE- Gnome apps are looking great!
If you’re seeing a faint seam along the title bar, make sure your Application Appearance > Colors settings are set to the Oxygen preset.
Firefox 4 looks great in openSUSE 11.4. I’ve got the Oxygen KDE add-on installed from KDE-look. It really looks like a KDE app. No longer distracted!
For those that prefer Google Chrome, take a look at the Oxychrome theme on KDE-look. Follow the instructions and Chrome will look like it belongs in KDE. For what it’s worth, when I unzipped the scrollbars extension, there were no remote exploits or odd code- it’s just CSS. But you can never be sure- so check!
openSUSE came with a couple of apps preset to use the solid background color instead of the radial background: Gimp, Thunderbird, and Firefox. These exceptions are set in Workspace Appearance > Window Decorations, click the ‘Configure Decoration’ button and go to the ‘Window-Specific Overrides’ tab. There you can configure these and any other apps you want to make exceptions for in the KDE interface.
Thunderbird, Chrome and LibreOffice need this treatment, but Gimp and Firefox (with the Oxygen KDE add-on) do not.
To make Gimp look a little better, you can disable Wilber’s eyes in the toolbar palette windows: http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gimp-optimizations