In Linux, changing themes (skins) of windows elements and of the entire graphical environment is extremely simple.

Changing themes in XFCE and Gnome means changing the windows border, buttons and scroll bars.

Its possible to make your window manager appear like Windows Vista, Mac OSX or any other graphical environment.

There are hundreds of themes available. You'll find many of them at www.gnome-look.org and www.xfce-look.org.

In the following example we'll make our window manager take on a Windows appearance.

Changing the Borders and Title Bar:

We'll use a theme that already exists in the themes folder of XFCE: Default.

Click on the Window Manager that can be found in the XFCE control panel (Settings icon).

Changing the window contents:

Now we need to change the appearance of the window contents or more precisely the GTK theme, to match the borders we just changed.

Open the User Interface in the XFCE Settings Manager.

Pick a theme. Here we've chosen xfce-redmondxp.

Its also possible to download icon themes for XFCE. Change them by selecting one in the in the Icon Themes in the User Interface Preferences control.

Changing the top and bottom application bars.

The bottom control panel can also be changed in many ways. Just click the right mouse button in the corner of the panel choose Customize Panel.

In the example below we've set the bottom panel to stretch across the entire screen.

UPDATE: You can also use switch2 utility for gtk2 fine tuning:

type switch2 on terminal:

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