Spicing up my desktop

[hbien]

Right now my desktop is pretty plain, just an application toolbar at the bottom and a nice Chocobo wallpaper.

Just wanted to spice it up a bit, maybe another application toolbar like OS X or stuff from gDesklets. Any suggestions?

[abf]

keep it simple. more eye candy means more lag which means stuff takes forever to get done.

if you want to experiment, install E17 and configure it nicely... loaded with goods.

[seablade]

Agreed, e17 runs nicely and looks sweet. Of course keep in mind it is still in alpha stages mainly.

Seablade

[bigtrouble77]

While I agree with the other guys there's some cool stuff you can do with virtually no performance hit.

First thing I do is install the Tango icon theme. It's so much better than anything that comes with gnome. Just make sure that if you do that you have to log in gnome as root and install the theme there too. If you don't every time you run nautilus as root the icons will be messed up.

I also install the E17 window border theme. I also really like the default simple theme. Changing these things won't hurt performance.

The last thing I like installing is Cairo which allows you to have an animated barbershop-style progress indicator. Looks really sweet.

I'd stay away from gdesklets as it not terribly stable and getting the desklets running the way you want can be very difficult and unintuitive.

I can give more details on how to get this stuff wroking if you don't already know how to. What distro are you using?

[hbien]

I'm running on Gentoo. I think I'm gonna stay away from gdesklets if it uses up too much power (battery life is pretty important to me).