Is there some global injunction or crusade against window decorations that aren’t miniscule rehashes of the same featureless, colorless, flat themes and window decorations? I mean I know the GNOME folks have been waging a campaign against desktop theming and have managed to completely break titlebars in the latest GTK builds, but I would have hoped KDE would at least reject that failure of a trend.
I want to have titlebars, buttons & other UI components that actually have some texture and depth to them. If I have one window active, I would like it obviously differentiated from the inactive ones. The most I’ve found thus far is various themes meant to look like MSWin XP (and that look was ugly from the start). Clearlooks and Bluecurve had been nice, although Esco had been my favorite.
That’s fine, then why does it seem everybody’s themes are little more than clones of everybody else’s flat and featureless themes? It’s more like “hey look, I change the greyness of the grey border around these grey icons, it’s an all NEW theme!!”
Because they are free to do so. That’s the beauty of open-source content. People can change the themes to suit them and if they like upload them to Pling or other sites provided they adhere to the license.