Hello everybody. Please help me.
I'm not satisfied with KDE's default Oxygen theme; I prefer using QtCurve instead for it's great customization abilities.
So is it possible (and if yes then how) to:
a) make QtCurve default theme (both for window decorations and widgets) for all user accounts? (By editing the content of /usr/share/kde or /etc/kde4, not by putting settings in /etc/skel or something like);
b) remove unused standard themes (Plastique, Clearlooks, Motif etc. for widgets, Plastik, Keramik, Laptop and maybe Oxygen for window decorations)? By the way, can their deletion cause some malfunctioning of KDE?
If this information is required, I use openSUSE 12.3 x86_64 with KDE 4.10.
Thanks in advance!

I think this thread will help explain, especially the last post viewtopic.php?f=67&t=110481

Thank you for your reply, google01103.

Perhaps my question formulation was unclear. The topicstarter of that thread needs to make changes affecting all the existing user accounts. While I want just to modify a "template" for newly created accounts. That has to be much easier and shouldn't require to use any scripts.

tl;dr - if you want to *enforce* this, that's not possible.

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The correct way to do this is /etc/skel

You can (usually) set values in /etc/xdg/Trolltech.conf and /usr/share/config/kdeglobals

A simple way to figure such is btw. to strace and grep for eg. "config"

NOTICE that if a user does not like your ideas, s/he can just override those settings since the local config takes precedence - kiosk will allow you to enforce some things but for KDE only - and afair not the GUI style at all.

You can NOT "remove" plastique, motif or clearlooks - those are built into Qt, you've to rebuild Qt w/o them.
You can remove the decoration libraries and service files, but i would not really suggested it since
a) your distro will install them anyway with the next update (so the strategy is to unselect them in the first place)
b) if the selected deco doesn't work, kwin will not be able to fall back to the default one (oxygen) and your users will end w/o a titlebar.
libs are in /usr/lib/kde4, service files in /usr/share/apps/kwin

Please note that the location of the system wide KDE configuration files has been known to have been changed from time to time by distributions.

I would recommend checking the output of "kde4-config --path config" here - it is usually the last element (in my case, /etc/kde4/share/config).
Note that Qt won't respect that directory (although once again, distributions may have customised that as well).

luebking, bcooksley, thanks you for your answers.

luebking:

if a user does not like your ideas, s/he can just override those settings

That's okay, I want to change default theme, but not to disable installing of|switching to other themes.
I've quickly read the kiosk's description. Maybe that's the tool, which I need. But I have to explore his abilities first. Anyway thanks for your hint.

As for uninstalling window decoration. Won't that cause any troubles, if I live Oxygen as fall back theme and remove other ones?
You wrote

your distro will install them anyway with the next update (so the strategy is to unselect them in the first place)
unselect them in the first place
first place

Can you clarify, what have you meant by "first place" and unselection?

bcooksley:

Code: Select all

kde4-config --path config

returns ~/.kde4/share/config and /etc/kde4/share/config
Can changing the location of KDE's folders affect mods inside in some way? Are there any absolute paths that have to be updated after?

Qt won't respect that directory

Please explain this statement. What can that disrespect lead to?

In this case, the output of ~/.kde4/share/config and /etc/kde4/share/config means you should store your system wide personalisations in /etc/kde4/share/config rather than the /usr/share path mentioned above.

With regards to Qt - that means you still need to configure it separately, ie. it will not follow any settings set in KDE configuration files (at least not automatically anyway, the platform plugin under KDE may still apply those settings however).