This morning I was sickened for the last time at how ugly Skype looked when I opened it. While I was a KDE user I rationalized it away thinking that like many proprietary vendors, the Skype developers had targeted GTK and their support in KDE just failed. Or that they didn’t care at all how it looked. Face it, sometimes commercial software vendors don’t for some reason. But now that I’m back in ‘plain’ Ubuntu, I was surprised that it didn’t look, I don’t know, better.
So I did a search for ‘skype style gtk+ ubuntu ugly‘ and found this great tip. It turns out that Skype just needs the 32-bit theme engines to look nice. Happy day!
sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 gtk2-engines-murrine:i386