Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they’re patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6.
The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that’s happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I’d like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are not just my work, but also, as you’ll see, the work of the lead Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro, of several seasoned KDE developers, and of new contributors to Oxygen as well.
↫ Filip Fila
The effort to bring these themes back go much beyond just making them nominally work; the developers and designers are also making sure the themes work properly with all the new features that have come to KDE since the 4.x and 5.x days, like adaptive and floating panels, various forms of blur, and a ton more – which includes making sure the themes are fully compatible with Wayland, which introduced a slew of new visual glitches and issues to these old themes in recent years.
They are also working on improving, updating, and expanding the Oxygen icon set, which should surely bring back a ton of memories. This work involves not just designing new icons for applications and other things that didn’t exist back when Oxygen was current, but also fixing old icons that look blurry on modern setups, addressing cases where monochrome and colourful icons mismatch, and so on. They’re clearly taking this very seriously.
It seems to be an organic effort more and more people got involved with as time passed, and they’re aiming to have these themes ready for Plasma 6.7, to be released in June of this year. You can already try the current versions today, but they do require the absolute latest version of KDE Plasma to work properly. More improvements are planned for the coming weeks.
This whole thing brings a massive smile to my face, and is such a perfect illustration of why I love the KDE project and its approach and spirit. At this point in time, I personally can’t imagine using any other desktop environment.
I was never a fan of KDE4 design. And I must say that after a while Plasma 6 seems boring as well. Looking back, I think I was only ever satisfied with Unity back in 2012/2013. Nothing felt that magical afterwards, but that might be because it was my first desktop experience outside of Windows. Now I am thinking to switch full-time to Fvwm, but that’s like the whole other end on the spectrum.
Why are they wasting time on this when there are major gaps in functionality? I recently witnessed an attempted transition from Windows to KDE at a site with thousands of seats implode because accessibility tools like screen readers don’t work creating a legal liability and there is no unattended remote access possible on KDE systems going forward.
The KDE devs need to pull their heads out of their arses and work on actual problems. They’re stomping ants while elephants are stampeding.
Let me get that straight: someone had a problem that developers of KDE don’t have (they don’t have “a legal liability”, because they don’t sell KDE and thus are not exposed to such things), spent precisely $0 solving it — and yet, somehow, entirely volunteer organization is to blame for that.
Sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever. If you have “a legal liability” then contact an ACTUAL VENDOR that you have signed for doing the work, be it SUSE S.A. or anyone else, but don’t try to dump your demands on the volunteers who, by definition, work on things THEY need and not on things YOU need.
It’s, actually, THE WHOLE point of free software: if someone have needs that authors of software don’t foresee then said someone may fix the code to solve the problem… and as we may see this [almost never] works in practice.
That’s, essentially, why I’m not longer sympathetic to the whole free software idea: people just simply don’t care about “free as in free speech”, then only ever care about “free as in free beer”… and THIS is better served by Open Source approach, not Free Software approach.
I assume the legal liability lay with the organisation itself (and whoever made the decision) for not carrying out an accessibility assessment. If ‘thousands of seats’ were involved, that implies a large organisation and whoever was involved in the decision deserves to be fired for such incompetence.
zde,
Exactly. If they have a legal liability, they should check this beforehand. Or better yet, have a plan to implement it themselves or pay someone to do so (as everyone will now benefits)
Reminds me of the Internet legend where a user was using profanity “where the **** is the exe” on github source repositories:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1atqusj/newtogithub/
Same reason ReactOS has thousands of commits updating translations, but still isn’t done yet. The fabled skilled open source developers that can fix all the complex stuff simply don’t exist, or at least aren’t going to get to it anytime soon.
That’s a great effort. I was never a fan of the Air and Oxygen themes, but I applaud the idea of having a few really good, really complete desktop themes.
But if I could choose a KDE theme to update, it would be the Classic KDE 3.0 theme. The one where the window decorations were textured so you could get a good grip on them.