Lets face it, creating widget themes on Linux is pretty hard, and very hard for most artists. The two main toolkits on Linux, Gtk+ and Qt, can only use themed widgets by creating a new theme engine or using an existing pixmap engine that uses configuration files to define theme properties. Obviously, it is no fun to create themes using a text editor and lots of CLI commands, and it's no fun to create a theme engine either, especially because real artists are often not programmers by any means.

This is where UniTheme kicks in. UniTheme should provide the artist an easy to use interface and allow this person to create full themes visually, without even touching any configuration file.

Another problem of the previously mentioned way of creating themes using configuration files is that many people do not know how to apply a seperate theme to _every_ available widget. For example; current themes often use a button image for push buttons, flat buttons, listview headers and more, but that's clearly not the way to go because it's hard to make things look good when using the same image for 8 different widgets.

Also, the current situation of having 2 (most used) different widget toolkits does not really improve the looks of a GNU/Linux desktop either. That's why UniTheme will allow the artist to create themes once, and exporting it for use with multiple widget toolkits, provided that plug-ins for those toolkits are loaded into UniTheme. The goal for version 1.0 of UniTheme is to have support for the following widget toolkits and/or desktop environments: