Brooke has been teasing me about it, and she intends to tease me about it more on her blog later. But regardless of that fact, even though it didn’t start out with the intention to end up the way it did, I’m kind of proud of the results of this weekends efforts.

You see, ultimately I’m a geek. Not just your average geek. Sure, my personal space is a mess and my life is pretty much work/sleep/work/sleep like any other geek, but when it comes to my digital property I’m actually pretty fussy about the way its organised and the way it looks. The guys at work have discovered this. I can’t stand messy desktops covered in icons. So the Windows computers I use at work all have their desktops with the icons disabled and the Desktop “toolbar” added to the taskbar. Even thats too messy for me, but I have to give the guys at work something I guess.

For me, the “desktop” of my computer is a canvas and as important to the aesthetics of my working environment as the way the windows on the screen look, or the task bar is arranged.

And thats partly why I love Gnome so much. I can do so much with the apearance. It truly does become an extension of how I work and my own personality. In much the same way blogs are for people. Your website presents an aspect of your personality. It is the way you present what you have to say to the world. Anyone in business knows presentation is important. This is why I have to have a tie at work every day. This is why haircuts are essential and why keeping a beard trimmed is a requirement (well, in my case at least.)

So of course it should only be natural that when I sat down on Friday and finally had a chance to start putting some true effort into my desktop environment the results of that effort also reflect, in part, my personality in much the same way my website here does.

Now, I have to point out that the results were not intentional. I was honestly just going in a direction that I liked. However, the end result is such that Brooke teased me about it when she saw it, and fully intends to keep teasing me about it. :-) Why? Well… Take a look. :-)

I guess I’m just a green and black kind of guy. I swear that its purely coincidence that the way my desktop looks matches the colour scheme of my website. Well… Almost. :-)

Initially it was grey/black with light blue highlighting instead of green. But the more I looked at the blue, the more it bothered me for some reason. Yes, it was a nice blue, but the simple fact is that I’ve really gotten attached to the green on this website. I mean, its probably one of the few greens I can see and say its definitely green. Its not yellow, its not mustard, its green. And more than that, its actually easy on the eyes. Its definitely bright, but not so bright that its hard to look at.

However, the grey/black aspect of the way my desktop looks is purely coincidence.

And as for the desktop, I’ve now been using that desktop wallpaper so long its scary. 2 1/2 years or so. And yes, there was a brief period when I did try another look and style, but that didn’t last long

Teasing aside, I really like the way this has come out so far. Even though it is an almost perfect match for my website (Brooke made a comment about the shoes matching the handbag/purse) the muted colour scheme as you’re using it means the interface really doesn’t distract you. You concentrate on what you’re doing. The green highlighting acts as the perfect accent and stands out really well. Its bright but not blinding. The way background windows fade with transparency when they’re not in use helps lesson their distraction while you’re working in another window.

For the curious, the desktop is Gnome 2.20 on ‘Ubuntu Linux 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon’ with the Avant Window Navigator on the bottom of the screen and just a normal panel down the right. The icons in the AWN dock across the bottom are those apps either running, or launchers for the apps I use most. Thus a menu, Firefox, Thunderbird, a Terminal, Pidgin, Skype, Rhythmbox, Totem. After that are the running apps. In this screenshot its the Nautilus window showing the currently mounted partitions/drives. Under the time in the panel on the right is the “Tray” area, above it is a network monitor, the volume control, a user switcher and then the Gnome main menu.

I’m running a Nodoka engine based GTK theme called Bruzd thats been customised a fair bit and the icon theme is called gTangish-black. Both can be found on gnome-look.org. Firefox is running with GTK blending so I didn’t have to create a Firefox Xul theme separately.. If you run Gnome you’ll probably have it already. Pidgin (the IM client) is not themed beyond the GTK theme. Same applies to Skype (although you cannot see given its in the tray on the right panel.

I’m running a bunch of Screenlets that have all been themed to match. Thats one of the great things about SVG based interfaces. Its easy to make them all match. You can’t see the screenlets however because they’re on the Widget layer of the screen. :-)

Oh, and instead of the standard Gnome tracker and beagle search apps, I use the Google Desktop for Linux. Mainly because so much of my life is already on the Google servers so searching my stuff there is more useful than searching locally anyway.

And if you haven’t guessed already based on a few hints you can see in the screenshot, I do hve Compiz-Fusion running. However, as always, I have turned off the wobbly windows. I intend to discuss that a little more at a later date though. I’ve been using Compiz-Fusion/Compiz/Beryl for a while now and it was nice having the features included by default when I upgraded to Gutsy. But there are a few little issues about the way they set it up that I will cover at a later time.

I was running the Emerald window manager but Gutsy uses what I can only think of as an updated Metacity that will run both normally or with a composite desktop (Xgl/Compiz) environment. I have actually removed Emerald now. Mostly because nearly every Emerald theme out there just seems to be an attempt to recreate a Vista or OSX appearance. Personally I hate Vista’s appearance and OSX, while nice, has the controls on the wrong sides of the window ;-)

Oh!!! and before you start talking about how the AWN dock is just a ripoff of the new dock in Leopard, let me just remind you that Linux has had docks since long before OSX even existed. Hell, the venerable CDE of Unixes past (not to mention a CDE look alike in OS/2) could claim to be a dock and how old is that? Its just a natural way of doing things whether you admit it or not. Ironically, to my knowledge, AWN was 3D in appearance before Leopard’s dock. I’m sure someone will correct me if I have my dates wrong on that one though.