Will Plasma 5 appeal to users?

[GreyGeek]

Another question is "Will Plasma 5 appeal to users?" KDE 3 and Plasma 4 popped visually. Plasma 4 is the best DE made, IMO. Plasma 5 appears to me to be a pastel painting in which objects (controls, buttons, etc) are indistinguishable from surroundings except for an iconish look. I played with Arch's Plasma 5 as a guest OS. I found it fast and stable but still lacking breadth and depth in widgets. Although I initially liked it as I used it I found myself liking it less and less. Plasma 4 will go the way of KDE 3 in the near future so I have a choice to make about staying with Plasma 5 and forcing myself to like it or moving to another Distro and DE. I am experimenting right now with Mint.

[kubicle]

Plasma 5 appears to me to be a pastel painting in which objects (controls, buttons, etc) are indistinguishable from surroundings except for an iconish look. I played with Arch's Plasma 5 as a guest OS. I found it fast and stable but still lacking breadth and depth in widgets. Although I initially liked it as I used it I found myself liking it less and less.

This is basically just the new "Breeze" theme, not inherent to Qt5/Kf5/Plasma5. With different themes you can make it look like basically anything, but there aren't that many themes floating around yet (more accurately, there aren't many themes that don't roughly follow Breeze design guidelines).

Personally I can't find a single good thing to say about Breeze. IMO the people in the VDG shouldn't be let anywhere near Visual Designing. If that's all that was available for KDE, I'd switch to XFCE. Luckily I'm not bound to it (I really like my rounded objects, buttons that look like buttons, lights, shadows and gradients).

[GreyGeek]

...
I really like my rounded objects, buttons that look like buttons, lights, shadows and gradients.

That's exactly why I like Plasma 4, and why as long as Plasma5 is "breezy" I'll be using something else.

[NickStone]

@Greygeek: If you don't like breeze, there is always oxygen theme for plasma5.

[NoWorries]

@Greygeek: If you don't like breeze, there is always oxygen theme for plasma5.

I vote for Oxygen as well. I tried breeze again and I still give it a score of zero.

[whatthefunk]

I like Breeze. I wish it was more complete though. The icon theme is missing quite a lot so nothing looks consistent.

[Snowhog]

I'm using the Breeze Desktop Theme and the Oxygen Icon Theme. I think it's a reasonable compromise. I could go all Oxygen (and I normally do), but hey, I don't find Breeze all that unappealing. Even using the Breeze Icon Theme -- yes, flat icons -- isn't terrible. It's all just a matter of personal preferences and taste.

[NoWorries]

My reason for preferring Oxygen over Breeze is because of weather icons and other icons that I find more visible with Oxygen. With oxygen on my system, I get:



When I change to breeze, I get:

[kubicle]

We're reeling seriously off-topic
Perhaps we could separate this to a new topic and combine the two Neon threads?

It's all just a matter of personal preferences and taste.

While this is true for the most part (yes, I think Breeze is ugly, but that's just my personal preference and taste...others may find it beautiful for some mysterious other-worldly reasons ), it's not really all just preference and taste. One has to take usability into account as well and this is where Breeze falls flat (pun intended).

Flat modern design works remarkably well for some things, like web pages, which are mostly about viewing content. Web pages that use flat/modern "breeze-like" design are often easy on the eyes and less distracting (so I'm not uniformly against flat design...although IMO breeze is the ugliest example of it ).

However, the same design is remarkably bad with software (including desktop) design, which if more about interacting with and creating content. In these use cases it's really important to be able to easily distinguish content from interface visually. Breeze will continuously have users guessing which part of the "flat interface/content block" is interactive, or clickable, etc. ...it's just really bad design. It isn't very usable even if one finds it easy or beautiful to look at.

[LinkBot]

Air & Oxygen plasma themes

Plasma-devel: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel

-> KDE papercuts love: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasm...ry/048611.html

- "Air" and "Oxygen" Plasma themes are very, very low quality than "Breeze".I'd rather remove them.

--> https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasm...ry/048675.html

> - "Air" and "Oxygen" Plasma themes are very, very low quality than
> "Breeze". I'd rather remove them.
>


These are broken for some time now, especially the task
manager is unusable with smaller panels. The controls
look somewhat broken and many icons are actually missing.


I propose just removing them and encouraging people
to take it over and put at kde-look.org. Better to not ship
at all than broken like that imo.

---> https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasm...ry/048676.html

I suggested removing them a couple of times. +1

Also since it's not really the Air from 4.x but has some adjustments to use theme colors in tray icons before we dumped it in favor of Breeze. This makes it look rather awkward.

[LinkBot]

We're reeling seriously off-topic

It is the nature of the (Kubuntu) forums...

[oshunluvr]

I've noticed Plasma 5 themes are finally appearing on kde-look.org. There's a couple that look pretty slick.

[sithlord48]

i have been using qtcurve for my widgets using plasma5 i have one look for gtk2/3 and qt4/5 they all look the same .. i dont care the for the flat themes so im not using breeze.

[kubicle]

i have been using qtcurve for my widgets using plasma5 i have one look for gtk2/3 and qt4/5 they all look the same .. i dont care the for the flat themes so im not using breeze.

I use qtcurve as well (it's the best one around), but I wasn't aware there was a gtk3-theme for qtcurve? (there used to be, but I was under the impression it was discontinued because gtk3 developers kept moving the goal posts). Doesn't really bother me as I don't use any gtk3 software, but if you can point to where you found the gtk3-qtcurve I would certainly appreciate it

[LinkBot]

Air & Oxygen plasma themes 2

Air & Oxygen plasma themes 1 : https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post383851


Now:

- Bug 358533 - Remove Oxygen and Air Plasma themes : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358533
- Review Board: Remove Air and Oxygen themes - https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/126949/