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Also, IIRC, they plan to replace the default clock with a much simpler design at some point, so that it will be much clearer on a smaller panel.

The digits in the clock are struck though because it is a flip digit clock design.

Yes, but what's wrong with ordinary non flipping digits. There are no technical reasons for doing this on a computer screen, and this flip design is not common enough in real life to motivate doing it this way to help people identify it as a clock. It just makes it harder to read for people that is visually impaired.

It is also a matter of style, these flip clocks belonged to the 1970:s and 80:s, the rest of KDE 4 doesn't.

The question is should there really be a digital clock, analog clocks are much easier to read as they not only give you the actual time but also gives you a much better view of the time as an ongoing process.

I agree that the flipping digits design looks weird, like a bug almost. I contacted the artist and asked him to update it by not having a straight line gutting through all the digits but have it just so slightly tilted at each cut which in my mind would make it look a bit nicer, but he did not show much interested.

The problem with bringing real-world concepts and physical constraints into a computer GUI is that the have to be exaggerated and modified to fit the constraints and opportunities of the GUI. Flipping digits you say? Ok, so do they actually change by an animated flip? If no, drop them. If yes, reconsider as that can be highly disturbing.

Yes, I'm also looking you, you spinning desktop cube!

So the default clock in 3.5 was LCD, very 80's, now for 4.0 we'll have flip digit, 70's. Can't wait for KDE 5.0 lol

Note: for god sake get rid of those huge windows'borders. Vista is a plague. Since it's out, we got at least one per day at kde-look.org and even gnome-org for almost any existing window manager.

I'm pretty sure the clock looks like that because the plasma developers wanted to test out their animation framework, and it was about the only available plasmoid they had to test with at the time. I doubt it will be the default look, although they might keep it as an option.