There are definite reasons why people who step up behind me and take a look at my computer screen either flinch or look at me funny (sometimes both), and I expect people here will have some . . . interesting takes on this as well 😅. The colour choices may make more sense if you know that I’m usually in a low-light environment, so even some “dark” themes seem fairly bright to me, and anything with a white background is like a slap in the face.

Trinity Desktop Environment 14.1.0 on Gentoo, homemade theme. For those not familiar with TDE, it is a fork of KDE 3, from the days before indexing daemons and other such CPU-eaters, so this looks old-fashioned because it is. The wallpaper is Digital Blasphemy’s “Tropical Moon of Thetis”, and yes, the font is the dreaded Times New Roman, presented here in all its jagged glory because I prefer to keep hinting and antialiasing switched off. The system monitor text on the left is from conky. On the right, TDE versions of konsole and konqueror (as file manager).

(And just to clear up one piece of misinformation about TDE that comes up regrettably often: the development team forked QT3 along with the desktop and is maintaining it. So: unsupported widgetset no, QT3 more-or-less yes, if you find a bug please file it, if you don’t know of any bugs please don’t spread FUD.)