I've just installed Kubuntu 11.04 after using GNOME for 2 years, and the font colour in the task manager in the panel is just as unreadable as it was the last time I tried KDE (back when 4.0 came out).

Is there a way to change just the font used for descriptions of applications in the task manager widget in the panel? I've searched 'til I'm blue in the face and fiddled with different colour settings to no avail. I've even changed ALL colours that are black to yellow/pink/green/aqua/etc just to see whether I could change it, but I can't.

My eyesight is not perfect and I find it incredibly difficult to read black text on a dark-grey background. Surely I'm not the only one who has difficulty reading it?

Thanks heaps.

PS, which distro is the best for KDE, do you reckon? I'm wondering if Kubuntu is the best. It's locked up on me several times today already :-(

I've just found it. Although I do appreciate returning to KDE's ability to let me configure it (as opposed to GNOME knowing what's best for me and not letting touch anything!) I do feel that when it comes to colours/themes/widget/styles there are just far too many places to track down to change things. it's ridiculous, actually.

Anyway, in case some other poor sod is looking for the solution, you don't want to go anywhere near the "Common Appearance and Behaviour > Application Appearance" system settings icon, you need to go to "Workspace Appearance and Behaviour > Workspace Appearance > Desktop Theme" and choose a theme that wasn't designed by somebody wearing magnifying glasses -i.e., I went with the white on black "Oxygen" theme which I can actually read

Seriously, from KDE 4.0 to 4.6 and you're still allowing themes that are usability nightmares? What's wrong with you people

sorry for the rant, but this amount of hunting down a setting is not good at all.

don't think it's us people - think it's your distro that decides on the default look (colors, background and theme). FYI on OpenSuse Oxygen is the default theme, no idea what Kubuntu (or Fedora or Mandriva or Arch or etc....) uses.

If Kubuntu is locking, is there a consistency of the locking? are you running 4.7 or 4.6 of kde? what version of Kubuntu? did you add the kde rpm's on top of the existing gnome istall or do a clean install?

"lockup" - you mean the system froze and needed to be rebooted to function? when it locks up do the cap lock indicators flash? can you alt+f1 to a virtual terminal?

Thanks for the reply, but I've since installed Debian 6.0 with GNOME again. It's at least decent and un-molested by Mark Shuttleworth's really bad ideas. I won't rule out perhaps installing KDE on Debian one day, when even Debian decide to deprecate GNOME 2.30, but for now, I'm happy again.

As for the colours, I recall openSUSE using the same bad defaults for the task manager panel -i.e., medium/dark grey background with black text that was practically unreadable; but that was back in the 10.1/2 days when I actually used it for a few months. How anybody could see black text on a dark grey background as a decent default is entirely beyond me, and the inability to customise it so you can read it is similarly bad.

The lockups were complete X freezes, I couldn't switch to a TTY and I couldn't kill the X server. I don't even think Kubuntu had the magic keys enabled. I had to power off completely. In short, Kubuntu was very, very, bad and as bad as the last time I tried it a year or two back.