Plasma 5.8 and look and feel layouts

[Łukasz Sawicki]

Hi,

In the last week I tested a new Plasma 5.8 feature "Look and feel
layouts" to have something for our Plasma 5.8 promo materials. Let me
share some experiences here.


1. Random crashes (especially when I switch "Look and feel layouts"
for the first time. Unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce this
reliably

2. Basic functionality not working correctly
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367918
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368074

3. Some other weird bugs
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368022

Since this is a new feature bugs are to be expected and I am sure
Plasma team will fix them for Plasma 5.8 release.  But what worries me
the most is the missing functionality of plasma look and feel packages
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367921

which may result in broken desktop
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367920

Simply put when users will download a new lf package from
kde-look/store they will expect that plasma lf package will provide
all elements like icons, wallpapers, plasma themes, plasma applets
etc.  We can't expect from our users to manually download all required
packages when installing plasma lf package. I am afraid that in the
current state we will get many comments from our users about yet
another unfinished Plasma feature and not working content in KDE
Store.

So here my proposal. Lets postpone this feature for Plasma 5.9 and
remove any visible parts from look and feel kcm ("use desktop layout
from theme" and "get new looks").
So guys please work on this a little bit more and release something we
can be proud of, like this:

https://youtu.be/aLKHycF4rPw

Cheers
Łukasz Sawicki