I’ve been using Ubuntu 8.10 for a while now, since the first alphas were released, and I’ve been watching the artwork for Intrepid Ibex develop.

Now I think I’ve decided which theme I will be using in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and that is the Dust theme. You can get an idea of what it would look like on the Dust page, but I have mixed the dust theme with one of the proposed wallpapers for Intrepid Ibex that seems to mix well.

After mixing those, I realized that I couldn’t find a good skin for Opera to match the rest of the desktop so I set out to make my own.

I’m really not a big fan of the current default Opera skin, so I set out to find a skin that I felt was universally considered intuitive and easy to follow. That theme to me was the Google Chrome theme.

I had checked weeks ago on Opera Skins and found that no one had made a Google Chrome theme yet. Fortunately, this time I found one and it was done pretty well.

I grabbed the skin Chrome 1.92 and extracted the contents. Then the fun part began. All I had to do was replace a couple of images to make the header tie into the Dust theme title bar and desaturate the rest (or a great deal of them).

After that, zipped it up and tested it out. Here is what I got:

Opera is on the left, compared to Firefox on the right with a theme that was developed by someone else to match the Dust theme.

I will most likely make a Dust skin from the default Opera skin as well, but for now I’m enjoying the Google Chrome-Dust theme. :D

I’ll upload it to the rest of my Opera skins soon. I just need to polish up a few graphics and implement the Dust scroll bar (as seen in Firefox) for consistency.

UPDATE (2008-10-08 @ 6:06 PM):
The “Opera Google Chrome Dust” or “Dusty Chrome,” which ever you prefer, is now available in it’s initial release:
http://kyleabaker.com/goodies/opera/skins/opera-google-chrome-dust/

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