If you are just using a Window Manager (WM) like openbox, awesome etc without the full-fledged Desktop Environments (DE) like KDE, GNOME, etc, then applications build using Qt (VLC, Virtualbox, Google Earth, Scribus, etc) would look ugly. Like these: A simple solution would be to: 1) Install Qt toolkit from your distro's repository. 2) Soft link oxygen.so from kde4 lib to qt lib. sudo ln -s -T /usr/lib/kde4/plugins/styles/oxygen.so /usr/lib/qt/plugins/styles/oxygen.so 3) If you don't already have oxygen.so, download this (64 bit, kde 4.8.0) to your /usr/lib/qt/plugins/styles directory. 4) Run 'qtconfig' and select 'Oxygen' theme. Oxygen is the default theme for Qt apps. Other themes like GTK+ can also be selected if present.