Widget and windeco themes for Plasma Next

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 24 April 2014 14:11:57 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> === Where do we go from here? ===
> 
> If we ship what we have now, we'll have Breeze and Bridge together with
> Oxygen widget and windeco theme.
> While this has the advantage that Oxygen is "tried and true", it has the
> following drawbacks:
> - The Oxygen QtQuickControls style in its current condition (at least
> from any Plasma Next screenshots and videos I've seen) looks unpolished
> as hell. Labels in buttons aren't aligned correctly and there are other
> problems as well. If we ship Plasma Next like this, everything looks
> beautiful... until someone opens a GUI which was made with
> QML/QtQuickControls (which is all of Plasma's own GUIs iirc). As soon as
> people do, what they get looks like a crappy version of Plasma Current
> (aka "KDE 4").
> I don't think we want this. So if we want to at least be visually on par
> with current Plasma, additional work would have to go into the Oxygen
> QtQuickControls style (and according to David, a bug in Qt would have to
> be fixed)


As i made clear many times already, I am all for still defaulting to Oxygen 
for the first release (and possibly the second, for what matters)
A QStyle is years of working around corner cases, and there is no way around 
that.

Also, we are already battling against so many regressions that a strong 
discontinuity as a different default qstyle is the last thing needed 
(especially when realistically, most applications will be KDE4 ones for a long 
time still)


It's true that doesn't go much together with the breeze plasma theme, but they 
always were distinct, so is not really a big of an issue (i did the first 
mockups of breeze explicitly to go together with oxygen in fact, since i 
always assumed it was what it was going to be used in the first release)

Now, using QtCurve would be the less of the evils compared to go altogether 
with a new theme (but an evil still, the fact that i don't think any good look 
can come out of it is at least subjective ;)

In the end the less subjective reasons i have for this, is that i really think 
if we want to have any remote possibility of success in the first release the 
top priorities should be maximum continuity and minimize the potential sources 
of regressions (and since a qstyle affects just everything, do your math) and 
everything else has to take the backseat (yes, even unity of style)

So, I think changing away from Oxygen would be an huge mistake (saying again, 
just for the record).
If everybody wants to do that fine, but whatever it replaces it, *must* have a 
qt4 and a gtk version (iirc qtcurve does have gtk?), because integration with 
KDE4 and GTK apps is way more important than with the workspace, that was 
deemed to be different in the first place.


Cheers,
Marco Martin