Which styles to keep?

[Torsten Rahn]

On Tuesday 14 August 2007 10:37:02 Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> Sorry, but I disagree with all of the above. 

I'm sure somebody will disagree with any opinion. The question is whether it 
matters.

> We have supported different styles for a long time, 

I'll rephrase it for you again: I'm not against diversity. I'm against keeping 
styles like CDE, HighColor, B3 and LightStyle which are better off to be put 
into a computer museum than to negatively influence KDE 4's default 
appearance ( No doubt all of them were very innovative at the time they were 
developed ).

I'm pretty sure that you'd feel pretty much embarrassed if we shipped a very 
early, very old alpha version of KGoldRunner with the code just being 
translated with the Qt3Support library in parallel to current KGoldRunner 
just because some people "disagree" and liked the old version "better" than 
the current one.
I'm very sure that some KDE 4 reviewer would for whatever reason pick the old 
version of KGoldRunner and write a nice review that lines out, what a bad job 
the KGoldRunner developers did in KDE 4 having tested the outdated version.

For the same reason I'm against shipping them with kde-artwork, too as 
kde-artwork is _not_ kde-old-artwork (We don't ship old outdated KDE2 code in 
other periphery KDE modules either). And I'm pretty sure some distribution 
like SUSE will install everything by default anyways, so that it doesn't 
really matter that the outdated style will end up in kdeartwork or whatever.

> Microsoft gives their users the option to use their old look.

Well, for the same reasons I support shipping Plastique/k. But that should 
really be enough support for people who want something more conservative / 
less flashy. 

> As widget styles go, I still like B3 and Keramik more than Plastik and what
> is in the work at the moment. I think both have their use: on small screens
> I prefer B3, on larger ones I prefer Keramic, where the large border around
> buttons makes it easier to aim for the button.

I think B3 should be replaced by a more modern looking theme optimized for 
small screens. I don't care whether the theme gets "ported" to a new visual 
interpretation of the old style that matches the whole KDE4 look and feel 
better. But at least it either needs to be ported or replaced for the very 
same reason we don't ship old unported source code.

> Oxygen is still work in progress, an I hope there will be improvement to

Oxygen isn't really what my mail was about. It's about getting rid of themes 
which were nice at the time they were created but will only appeal to people 
who love to digg in memories.

> Oops! Sorry for the rant! :)

No problem, hope you don't mind mine.

Torsten

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