Ship with Aurorae and Qtcurve or not...

[Hugo Pereira Da Costa]

On 06/17/2014 10:56 AM, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com 
> <mailto:notmart at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Thursday 15 May 2014 11:39:00 Jens Reuterberg wrote:
>     > Ok so after the feedback from the Beta Release an issue that we
>     knew was
>     > coming have happened. Visuals being the most easily accessible
>     bit of
>     > anything technical, people have reacted negatively to the lack
>     of change.
>
>     just to give a shot on every and single options, i gave a try to
>     modifying
>     oxygen in order to make it look like breeze (therefore sharing all
>     the things
>     that it does that are not related to painting, like drag the
>     window from
>     anywhere)
>     this is the half done, half missing attempt (ignore the non
>     changed elements)
>     http://wstaw.org/m/2014/05/29/plasma-desktophP1414.png
>
>     is pretty hacky, but *maybe* is possible to have in the end only a
>     different
>     stylehelper (and pixelmetrics/stylehints)
>     so could be something worth exploring in the future
>
> Adding Hugo with a very due explanation of what it is:
> The Visual Design Group came up with an idea for a new design for a 
> widget style in KDE.
> But of course a Qt widget style is an huge undertaking that will take 
> a lot to do.
> Now, Oxygen is the sum of years of experience and fixes, (and also 
> does a ton of things to make application behave well that are beside 
> just "painting", not to mention the companion themes that integrate 
> nicely gtk 2 and 3 apps) and would really be a shame to lose all those 
> years of development and experience, so I was wondering how hard would 
> be to adapt the Oxygen codebase to a new visual style (would be a new 
> style, or perhaps hopefully something sharing a lot of code)
>
> in the link above, there is a screenshot of an attemptIi made to quick 
> and dirty try to adapt some of the elements (is incomplete and only 
> partial, but promising, seems that changing rounded radiuses and 
> removing some gradients here and there gets pretty close)
>
> Hugo, do you think it would be a feasible thing? And would you be 
> interested in it? (I was thinking about something like maintaining 
> most of the style, and set apart an oxygenhelper(as is now) vs 
> breezehelper for the different visual related things)
>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin
>
Hi Marco, others,

Sorry for the delayed answer.

First off, I unfortunately have very little time left since about half a 
year to dedicate to KDE/Oxygen aside from bug fixing and it is likely 
not going to improve. So that I would not be a reliable choice for 
undertaking the development of a Breeze Qt4/Qt5/Gtk2/Gtk3 widget theme. 
(though I could give an occasional hand to anyone volunteering).

As for starting from Oxygen's code base, I think it is a good idea 
indeed. Large amount of code could likely be reused quite unchanged: 
animations, window grabbing, fancy splitters. They could even be moved 
to a library, that Breeze would load.
(ok there is versionning, API freeze etc. involved, but no serious core 
development)

As for the styling, indeed rewriting the helper class is a possible 
start. Also, current oxygen  has basically one method for every 
primitive/control/etc. So it should also be easy to just inherit from 
it, and just re-implement these methods one after the other ...

Still, that would not bring you Gtk2 and Gtk3, which is quite a serious 
issue.

For such things, QtCurve is indeed a good candidate, since as far as I 
know it is the only widget theme around that implements all major 
flavors of toolkits ... but has an issue of "over-configuraribility" by 
design, which is not so good for branding, imho.

Last but not least, you could try "hire" the latest QtCurve dev for KDE 
(Yichao Yu <yyc1992 at gmail.com>)
, to work on a cut-down and cleaned-up version of QtCurve, called 
Breeze. The guy is good, nice, very active and knows all of both Qt and 
Gtk. He has help debugging/fixing oxygen and qtcurve simultaneously 
quite a number of times already.

QtCurve already use (copy) part of oxygen's code (and vice versa), so 
here also I could contribute, without taking maintainership.

... and finaly, there is window decoration. I guess one could start with 
an aurorae theme (although not optimal, since you ultimately need some 
extra features, such as synching with the widget theme, for background 
gradient for instance).

Hugo


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