KDE dudes provide themes while waiting for Themes.org to come back

– by Tina Gasperson –
People are bitching about the long wait at Themes.org (a sister site to NewsForge) for the re-design and the re-opening of several key sections of the site that houses desktop graphics for Linux GUIs. But KDE folk are doing something about it.”The site’s still down and has been down so long that it’s almost laughable,” goes a post on kde-devel. “Rather than rely on OSDN (corporate parent of NewsForge and Themes.org) to do it for us, is there any chance of our own themes site being hosted at [for example] themes.kde.org?”

Turns out there’s no need to create a themes.kde.org, because “things are piling up quickly” at www.kde-look.org, a whole siteful of wallpaper, themes, window decorations and icons. It’s strictly for KDE-related content.

Registered users can upload their theme creations to have them displayed and available for download on the site. The most popular download right now is “High Performance Liquid,” a mosfet theme. If you know who mosfet is, you won’t be surprised to hear he’s checked out of Linux again. The theme, however, is safely archived at the kde-look site.

Themes.org seems to be making progress, albeit slowly, with its site redesign in the wake of a break-in that raised questions about possible security problems. A surf to the main page just brings up a sign telling us to go to classic.themes.org.

A September 15th post to the Themes.org forum by site director ElCoronel calls for volunteers to help with staffing, writing submission guidelines, and scanning content. He writes, “Development is nearly done and it appears the new site will arrive very soon.”

Soon can be a relative term, though, and looking at the speed of KDE’s development timeline, it’s not surprising that they just couldn’t wait.