Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Right clicking on your Windows XP desktop and choosing Properties will take you to the Display Properties window, and it’s from here you can change your desktop theme and wallpaper.
Kubuntu
Kubuntu (and KDE in general) works in a very similar way. Right clicking on the desktop and choosing Desktop Settings will give you a window from which you can either change your desktop to a preinstalled image, or add a desktop wallpaper using the ‘Open…’ button.
As well as getting the usual options to scale/resize/crop your wallpaper image, you can also choose to either have your wallpaper as an image, a slideshow or a colour gradient.
As for a theme, this is where KDE differs slightly. Open the System Settings, then open the Workspace Appearance. Here you’ll see two main things: Window Decorations and Desktop Theme.
Window Decorations is used to change the appearance of your windows, or window borders if you like.
Desktop Theme is where you change the look of everything else, such as your taskbar, widgets, etc. Clicking the Details tab will let you fine tune the desktop theme should you want to mix and match.
Gnome-Shell
Changing wallpapers in Gnome is very easy. Just right-click on an empty part of the desktop and choose the last entry in the drop-down menu called Change Desktop Background. Some standard desktop pictures are supplied. If the right one is not in the list you can always choose to download more from the net. To do that, choose: Get more backgrounds online.
Opening the window to change the desktop background is also possible by using the menu structure: System > Preferences > Appearance.
When you look at the top of the window, you’ll notice the first tab is called Theme. Here you can change the complete theme – in other words change the way your desktop looks. Just as with the background pictures, a number of predefined themes have been included in the installation. Also here, when you have a different taste, you can download more themes online. Another possibility is to select the theme that’s as close as possible to your wishes, and then adjust it so it will become your theme.
Select a theme and click on the button Customize. A window appears in which you can do almost everything to set the theme the way you want it to be. Just experiment with it. Even when you don’t manage to get it exactly as you want it, you might stumble on another one which is even better.
It’s all very straightforward. The nice thing is you can’t do anything wrong, so just go ahead and try it.
Lubuntu
Unlike the other desktops discussed here, Lubuntu goes to great lengths to keep all aspects of the desktop and management thereof as lean as possible by default. And “lean” is what Lubuntu is all about, so we’ll limit this discussion to the default options since, as has been mentioned in previous installments of this series, you can access the repositories and customize Lubuntu to be as “heavy” as you want.
To manage the most basic desktop settings, right-click any unoccupied area of the desktop and select Desktop Preferences from the pop-up menu to open the window of the same name. By default, the Appearance tab has focus on which you can set Background options for the desktop as well as specify text options for text that displays with objects placed on the desktop (e.g. icons).
The two options for selecting/setting wallpaper don’t get much simpler than this! Clicking the Wallpaper “field” opens the file manager, and this allows you navigate to the image you want to use as your wallpaper. The Wallpaper mode option opens a pop-up menu that allows you to specify how you want the image displayed on the desktop (e.g. stretched, centered, etc.). The Text options determine how text associated with desktop objects (e.g. icons) is displayed.
To select Themes, control window appearance and behavior, and configure other desktop options, open the Openbox Configuration Manager (from the main menu, select Preferences > Openbox Configuration Manager).
By default, the Theme category is selected. As you can see, Lubuntu comes with several Themes (12) by default, and you can add new themes at any time. To change a theme, simply click on the theme example displayed; this will immediately apply the theme throughout the system, even to windows that are already open. Clicking on other categories reveals their respective configuration options. (Note: The Mouse category actually determines the behavior of windows based on mouse movement/actions.)
For even more control over the display of your desktop, from the main menu select Preferences > Customize Look and Feel, which opens the window of the same name.
The options available in this window allow for considerable customization and “tweaking” of many different parameters including custom foreground and background colors for windows, tooltips, etc, changing icon themes, mouse cursor themes (Note: none are installed by default), window borders, and more. There is some overlap in functions between this window and the Openbox Configuration Manager, but the information is displayed [in their respective windows] differently.
Lastly, you can also control the appearance of the Panel on the desktop. Right-click on any unoccupied area of the Panel and, from the pop-up menu, select Panel Settings; this opens the Panel Preferences window.
Click on the Appearance tab to configure the look of the panel by changing its background and font. By default, “image” is selected as the background for the panel. Click on the “field” to the right of the “image” radio button, and the file browser will open to the panel images directory where there are many (>20) images from which to choose by default. Obviously, you can add more if you want.
Xubuntu
In Xubuntu, like many other desktops, launching the settings dialog to change the background can be done by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting “Desktop Settings…” from the menu. The dialog will give you several default options, as well as the option to upload your own desktop background and define how you want it placed on your screen (centered, tiled, stretched, etc), and, if it doesn’t fill your whole screen, what background color to use and how that should be styled (solid, horizontal or vertical gradient).
You can also launch this menu by clicking on the Mouse icon > Settings > Settings Manager > Desktop.
Like KDE, Xfce has the desktop appearance split into two different components, the GTK Theme (called Appearance Style) and a Window Manager Theme.
The Appearance Style dialog is opened via Mouse icon > Settings > Settings Manager > Appearance, and here you select what style you wish to use to determine desktop color pallet, including contrast. Several options come with Xubuntu by default, and, by selecting them, they will be applied immediately – so you can see what it looks like. The full Appearance settings menu also allows you to change what icons, fonts and some other settings to use.
The Window Manager Theme dialog is opened via Mouse icon > Settings > Settings Manager > Window Manager, and this is used to change the theme of the actual window borders. Just like with the Appearance Style dialog, selecting on one of the many options that comes with Xubuntu by default will immediately apply that theme so you can check it. In addition to Style settings, the Window Manager dialog has options to change keyboard shortcuts, window focus behavior, and more.
By default, Xubuntu uses the Greybird style for both Appearance and Window Manager themes.