D16031: [SDDM theme] remove blur and increase UI contrast so that it's not required

[Nathaniel Graham]

ngraham abandoned this revision.
ngraham added a comment.


  Yes, I think the old Plasma theme was great. It was changed as part of the "Boot to Shutdown" initiative (T2062 <https://phabricator.kde.org/T2062>) which in retrospect must be counted as a failure. It turned out to be not implementable according to the original design due to technical impediments, and what resulted from the effort anyway did not prove popular with users. We've been sort of incrementally reverting parts of it over the past year or so, but without any specific design in mind.
  
  I think that's why this particular design never seemed to come together. With the original design, the elements all float above a blue background. But the blue background was ugly and unpopular and people replaced it with wallpaper. This looked pretty but introduced contrast problems. So we put the wallpaper there by default and blurred it to ensure contrast, but that defeated the purpose of adding the wallpaper since you couldn't actually see it! So now we get user complaints that they can't see the wallpaper on the lock screen and that it looks like a dark muddy mess. In this patch I removed the blur and tried to solve the contrast problems with a combination of drop shadows, new icons with built-in backgrounds, and a bottom bar, but the result never felt cohesive and our designers kept trying to redesign it over and over again--a sign that it still wasn't right. It started to feel like a game of whack-a-mole.
  
  The root of the problem is that with this basic design, all the different elements want to hover over the background, unconstrained by a box or frame. This requires tight control over the background which in practice doesn't work since it's user-customizable and limits our own design choices (e.g. we could never use a light-colored wallpaper since then the text and icons would be illegible).
  
  What I think we need to is come up with a new design that accommodates arbitrary backgrounds from the start, probably by putting all the UI elements in some kind of box, like the Plasma ≤ 5.7 theme, Elarun theme, Maldives theme, etc. And most importantly, they should feel //good// in a box or frame. it shouldn't feel like they're uncomfortable together, like they want to escape.
  
  There's no time left for 5.15; let's give it a shot in 5.16 timeframe, with an eye towards producing something timeless that does not work against itself. Only then will our users feel satisfied and our designers will stop trying to redesign it. :)

REPOSITORY
  R120 Plasma Workspace

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D16031

To: ngraham, #vdg, #plasma, rizzitello, davidedmundson
Cc: alexde, raddison, romangg, davidedmundson, rizzitello, abetts, pstefan, broulik, rikmills, filipf, rooty, plasma-devel, jraleigh, GB_2, ragreen, Pitel, ZrenBot, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, sebas, apol, mart
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