Reviewing Plasma themes

[Aleksey Alekseyev]

Greetings, mighty Plasma people!

I maintain a Russian blog about KDE since 4.0 went out -- you can find
it at http://knotes.ru (I have several co-bloggers there now, but I am
the most active) Recently I have posted a big review of Plasma themes
-- the text is of course in Russian, but in this case screenshots
matter the most:

http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-1/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-2/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-3/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-4/

I want to give you some observations based on work I done.

1. Most of popular themes (I reviewed the themes bundled with Plasma
and some highest rated/most downloaded themes from GHNS) have
usability problems. I was surprised to see either black text on dark
background or white text on light background in so many themes. Some
themes don't work well with too dark/too light backgrounds (that's why
I provided 2 screenshots for each theme). Lancelot has problems with
many dark themes (I didn't provide a Lancelot screenshot for each
theme, but I specified in the text part which themes tend to show
black-on-dark text in Lancelot). Network monitoring widget has
problems with most of themes.

One would think that default theme shipped with KDE SC 4.4 shouldn't
have all these problems -- yet it's very hard to see something on
network monitoring widget with this theme (also: please make "old" Air
available as an alternative)

2. Plasma is still unstable. I had more than a dozen crashes of Plasma and KWin.

Of course, it's not typical to have so many widgets on desktop, but it
seems like a good test case when you're working on stability.

3. Widgets are clumsy. Arranging them took some time and made whish to
punch my monitor, because widgets tend to jump back after I resized
and/or moved them. This again is not as annoying when you don't have
so many widgets, but it's something that you might to want to look at.
Folder View is exceptionally cunning: if I move/resize it, and then
restart Plasma, it tends to move back where it was before I moved it.

4. I hate new widget explorer. It has so many usability problems, I
could write another lengthy rant about it. Please go back to the old
"add widgets" dialog and explore the posibilities of improving it.

Please understand that even though that maybe sounded like an angry
rant, I consider myself a big supporter of KDE4, so I am posting these
observations here, to the people who are working on these things, so
you can probably fix them.

Thanks for your great work on KDE and Plasma!


Aleksey