Commenter aescnt replied to my extended review of Dust, a proposed new look for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex or future releases, to point out that updates to the theme have been released that address some of my past criticisms. I reinstalled Murrine, which I had embarrassingly neglected to do before my extended review, and slapped on the new Dust release. This was around ten days ago, and I’ve been so busy for the last fortnight that I failed realise I have been using, and enjoying Dust for all that time. If nothing else, this proves that Dust has gone from being a patchwork prototype to a coherent, functional look.

The verdict? Vastly improved. I really, really like this theme now.

Let’s look at the major changes. The min/max/close window controls were my major bugbear with the old look:

Small, fiddly and ugly. Yuck. Now, they’re larger, better integrated with the theme and produce a cool ‘glow’ effect when you hover over them:

The second major flaw with the old Dust was contrast. No matter how I tweaked things like transparency, my LCD monitor’s brightness and contrast settings, the system fonts and even the wallpaper, everything was still impossibly dark and I found myself squinting just to open Gnome menus. No more. Maybe it’s because of Murrine, or because of tweaks to the theme itself, but my eyes are much more comfortable with the new Dust and I can pick out text on window titlebars and Gnome panels with ease.

The ‘new’ Dust includes some extra bonuses. The long-promised Firefox theme has been released, tweaking the browser’s look and feel into line with the rest of the system without the previous text/background colour clashes. Although it’s not perfect – the tabs particularly look a little too Star Trek – it’s a major improvement that helps Dust to integrate into the GUI rather than stand awkwardly against it:

Nautilus, too, has been brought into line. The changes are subtle but the clashes between different elements (such as the grey statusbar with near-black resizing handle) have been smoothed out into a pleasing, unified look:

Dust comes packaged with a neat little script which adds some Compiz-powered drop shadows and other effects I would never have thought of using but which look really great, especially under tooltips and the Gnome panels:

I’ve had a little problem installing the Dust theme a few times now: when I try to install it through System > Preferences > Appearence, I get an error message “Can’t move directory over directory”. The only solution I’ve found for this so far is to remove all Dust-related folders from my ~/.themes directory, then installing the them normally. Apart from that, Dust delivers a near flawless experience.

One other theme-related item: check out these comments from Adam and marianomd for some advice on snazzing up the system fonts.

Credit again to sandman for the excellent wallpaper photo.

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