New SDDM Theme

[Philipp Stefan]

Hello everyone,

as many of you surely have seen by now: the new SDDM theme in the Plasma 
5.7 beta announcement has cause many very negative reactions. After a 
few hours of deliberation and weighting our options the VDG came to the 
conclusion that it is better to postpone the release of the new SDDM 
theme and accompanying artwork to the 5.8 cycle. That mostly means that 
the "old" 5.6 SDDM theme will be used and both SDDM and ksplash will use 
the 5.7 default wallpaper as background.

Please let me explain our reasoning: because of our less than ideal 
communication the new SDDM theme got started very late in the 5.7 cycle. 
Judging by reactions on multiple sites people did not understand that 
the new theme is part of the ongoing project of ours to get a unified 
experience from boot to shutdown. It's likely that users updating to 5.7 
would feel the same. So even if we would manage to bring the new SDDM 
theme as it currently stands to the point envisioned by the design it 
would still be the odd one out in combination with the current logout 
dialogue.

One idea was to simply get rid of the much detested blue background and 
use the default 5.7 one instead while trying to get the UI closer to the 
design i.e. fixing the bugs until the end of the beta phase. However, 
this would still leave us with two clashing UIs as stated above. In 
essence we would go from a similar login and lock screen theme in 5.6 to 
a dissimilar one in 5.7. This would clash with our goal of offering a 
more unified experience, even if it was for just one cycle.

So all in all we think it will be better to land the new UI as a whole 
and not step by step. This will give us much more time to refine the UI 
design than what would be possible in the little time left and also 
present users with a coherent experience from day 1.

Cheers,

Philipp Stefan