Tech Over Tea - Bringing KDE's Oxygen Theme To The Future | Filip Fila

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Today we have Filip Fila on the podcast who got started on the revival of the Oxygen theme for KDE Plasma 6 the main theme from the KDE 4 era.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Blog Post 1: https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/02/08/beating-an-old-but-not-dead-horse-what-to-do-with-the-oxygen-and-air-themes/Blog Post 2: https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/halfway-there-to-6-7-updates-on-oxygen-and-air/KDE Website: https://kde.org/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as who is your host, Brody Robertson. And you may have heard of the recent effort to revive the old KDE-4 oxygen theme. And today, we have the person who is leading the charge on that. I assume other people have gotten involved with the project since sort of it began, but introduce yourself and we'll just go from there. Yeah, hi, everyone, and thanks for... for inviting me here.

My name is Philip Fila. I'm actually a political sociologist, but this is a hobby for me, so I do a little bit of programming, a little bit of designing. I've been a KD user for a long time. Actually started with KD4, so I have a sort of emotional attachment

with these themes as well, and the design from that era. This project, you can call it a revival, reboot, however you want to call it. First started off, it's just the idea of fixing up these themes that, you know, one day I just switched to the oxygen theme. I hover over button and there's black text on a black background. I'm like that looks pretty bad.

But it's grown into something so much more. I would say now it's also project about the whole like oxygen, not just the plasma theme, but also the icon theme, window decoration, and so on, just fixing them up a little so they look respectable, so they're up to today's standards. And basically they don't look like abandonware. Because that's kind of the state it was in, right? Before you started sort of playing around with it,

it had been taken out of like the core plasma, yes? I guess the answer would be actually yes and no. Because several KD developers actually did patch up oxygen. Obviously they ported it to plasma 5, and they also ported to plasma 6. So I don't take any credit for this. This is the regular work they've done, and this should be definitely mentioned for this. So as far as the icon theme, the window decorations, the application style, I think nothing changed regarding that.

It's still being shipped. But with the plasma themes, there was a change. So the oxygen theme was moved to its own repo, and the air theme got deleted, unfortunately. Air is the light varying, yes? air the light theme yeah it was deleted in plasma five they were actually shipped alongside breeze which uh i think wasn't ideal i think this solution right now is absolutely the correct one if someone wants an oxygen look they install the package and if they don't they don't have these things on their system right and if it's especially with kind of the state it was in where

it was obviously ported to plasma five but not properly being poured to plasma six you're obviously going to have, whilst five and six do look very similar, there is obviously changes that have happened along the way, there's new functionality that is there, and I would assume with any of the new, I actually don't know, with any of the new

stuff that was added, what did the oxygen theme, like, do with that? Did it just, like, entirely broken, or? I think it was actually broken before that, because as I mentioned in the blog post, even the simple thing,

such as a color scheme was wrong, so for buttons. And then if you had a combo box and a drop-down, it was light text on a white background. It was just something simple, and it goes to show that these plasma themes were perhaps the least maintained part of oxygen. And so the end result was what it was. And that's why, I mean, the idea was just to fix them up, yeah.

So I guess probably a good place to start is you did say you have sort of a nostalgia for the KD4 look, that oxygen look. Did you prefer air or oxygen back then? Just kind of curious. Oh, oxygen. Okay, okay. Not a light themes guy.

Fair right. And I know there's people that like it. And also due to like historical respect because actually for most of KD4 is wrong, air was the default theme. So it seemed a little bit unfair that it was just deleted. it, but obviously it needed maintaining.

So that kind of leads me into where I was going with that. Why even bother? Like, yeah, it's neat to be able to do it, but, you know, the look of plasma today, it's this breeze look. I like breeze. I know some people complain about, you know, plasma this, modern design. I don't like the look of plasma. There's always someone that has some complaint about it, whether or not.

they can articulate what the complaint is. But I personally like to look at it. So with that being the case, I guess why even bother trying to bring this into modern plasma? I think there's so many avenues to explore here. From like a business point of view, cause benefit sort of thinking, you have a theme that was developed in 2000s

and now you're patching it up, maintaining it. If you're just using this logic to think about things, doesn't make sense. Of course, you just say, nuke it, let's invest energy in something that's more current. That's a default offering. Let's make it look better. But to me, the bigger story here is that KD isn't business. It's a

community of values. And in that sort of community, it exactly makes sense that a theme like oxygen could survive. So a theme from 2000s, and that's the beauty of KD. And another value that I see in KD is choice.

Something that defines it, like as it both, as its core value, and even if you're looking at it from market point of view, like looking at the other competitors, KD offers the plasma desktop offers you a chance to customize it. It's not opinionated in a sense it doesn't offer one theme or whatever that thinks it's the best, but it gives you the choice. And precisely again, in this sort of system, these values, having a theme that might not be shipped by default, but it's part of the community, I think actually makes a lot of sense. So that's for the KD part. Like for the, then there's this historic part.

Then there's this design part. Historically, it has value. You have to admit it because it was such a big part of KD4. And KD4 is a big episode in KD's history. Design-wise, I guess, part of this is subjective always, right? But personally, when I was switching from KD4 to Plasma 5, I wasn't enthused at first. I thought it looked worse.

I looked at Katie for it and saw this is fancy. Look at all these details. This is very impressive. It was a design that impressed me. With Pazma 5, it moved into this more of functionalist perspective. So function comes first. There's not a lot of ornaments. If you look at the theme, it's mostly like simple shapes and so on.

And I think with this project also revealed, is that there's actually a desire for these sort of non-flat looks, non-flat designs, that's who captivate people today, you know, and I was just thinking, like, when was the last time that I looked at UI design and said, oh, wow, this is impressive, this is fancy, even if it, if you might not like it, but you can appreciate that it's trying to do something that isn't just like, you know, a very serious clean looks. There's a lot of designs that you come and you say, okay, this is well. done, this is clean, but with oxygen, I think it offers this other part that tries to elicit

some emotional response in you. Yeah, I think ever since Google started rolling out their sort of material design language, there was this big shift towards, you know, before that you had a lot of skeuomorphism, and I can understand why there was a shift away from that, skeuomorphic design. icons are expensive to make when you're doing really complex icons. Completely understandable. But I don't think you have to go from one extreme all the way to the other. I think there is somewhere along that continuum where you can still have this interesting expression and really play around with UI concepts.

So when I first saw Oxygen, I thought, okay, this is neat. But the more that I look at it, the more it grows on me, right? Like, when I first started using, like, one of my first home computer, I'd use, you know, computers at school and stuff before. My first home computer, it was Vista. And oxygen is designed in that similar sort of era. It has a lot of Vista sort of, a lot of aeros sort of elements to it. Obviously, it's a very different kind of design. but it lists that same sort of idea

where you have this glow to these UA elements, there's this sheen to them, things feel kind of, I guess, metallic in a way, I don't know if that's the best word for it, but there's depth to the elements, it feels like there's light shining off of them. I personally am really starting to, like, really vibe with it.

Yeah, I think just what you said, it's interesting, And the same thing is like, for instance, if you look at buildings, you look at new modernist buildings, their box usually gray, white, and so on. You look at these old buildings and you look at all of these ornaments, it tends to be something that does captivate your attention. And I think that's the same with oxygen. Obviously, it is a product of its time. And if you look at some things, you wouldn't quite designed it that way today. But I think it still looks good as a whole that it's coherent. And I think there also might be also, yes, this nostalgia element is, you know, we all grew up with Windows Vista, Windows 7.

We're pretty impressed by this era of design. But I have to mention that the lead designer, Nuno Pinheiro, has also been working on this. It's been great to actually get in touch with the man himself. It says it wasn't really inspired by that. It was its own thing. It is an articulation of its time, but they were doing their own thing. Sure, I don't think it's trying to be a clone of this. It's obviously not trying to be that.

If you look at it, it's very clearly its own thing. But contemporary design of the time was more in line with what oxygen is, right? It's when everything else at that time has this similar sort of design language, it makes sense it's going to share some of those some of those similar sorts of ideas yeah of course of course yeah and what you said about like for instance with icons is also an important

aspect because now when we're working with nunya and you see how much work it is to actually create a skemorphic icon and you can create a symbolic like one of those monochrome icons really fast but this is it really takes its skill and it takes a lot of time yeah Oh yes so okay on the second post you had some of the icon examples

yeah I am looking at the the dolphin example yeah yeah that I can see the problem what's the compass used for the compass is actually used for the places icon in the panel so right now if you switch to oxygen icons you get a mismatch that's another big topic that actually came up is how do we fix them up because it's also sort of not a complete experience.

If you have a colorful icon here, a monochrome icon there, it just looks unpolished. And this is a result of many things. One thing is that in Plasma 6, plasma themes can't ship icons anymore, right? So if you're using them in the panel, you're now relying completely on the icon theme. So the icon theme now has to pull all of this weight. And the thing with oxygen is that it reserves

these regular icon names. So for instance, places or whatever, application slash menu for colorful icons. And in plasma code, you have this mix of code that's calling regular icons and symbolic icons. And in Brees, they're all, in effect, they're all monochrome. So it's not a problem, but with oxygen, you get this mismatch. But with plasma 6-7, that's also something we've been working on and that a lot of progress has been made. So when oxygen icons gets released, I should maybe say that it's on its own release cycle. So there's KD frameworks and probably I think the latest version is 6.25. But oxygen icons is going to be 6.2. And it's going to come around like plasma 6-7 time. And then once you update on plasma 7 because we needed to make changes

to plasma code, you'll get a much, much better experience. So things. should be consistent. Mm-hmm. Like all the icon types. So what sort of state was the, were the icons in? Like, oh, you mentioned, you mentioned that there was this like symbolic mismatch. If you had tried to just use the Oxygen icons as it is, like, could you even use them? Like, was there anything, like, was it just so different that it just couldn't be done at that, like, initially?

You could use them, but there was this issue with mismatch, simply. non-symbolic, and then for every icon it doesn't exist in oxygen, you got to fall back to breeze. So you also get mixed with breeze icons that didn't obviously feel quite, you know, it's a completely different style. Right. So this was, the main thing here was just adding some of these missing icons to oxygen. Some of them will also roll low resolution. So this has also been work with trying to provide bigger P&G sizes. But yeah, but the most important thing is for plasma code.

And this is why it's great to be a part of the KD community is because you can communicate with fellow developers. You know, I ask, does this make sense for you? Can we change the code so it's symbolic? I'm sure they said yes. And everyone's always glad to help. Oxygen really benefits in that sense from being a part of this ecosystem. You mentioned the icons were small. were the source files for the icons still around?

Yes, so you have the, so oxygen is different in the sense that it has SVG sources, but then it just renders them as P&Gs at different sizes. According to Nuneo PINERO, the idea here is that it's cheaper to render P&Gs than do SVG rendering. So sometimes some icons were rendered at, I don't know, 30.0.32, But you have this place that won 64 by 64. And what does it do? It just uses 32 and upscales it. And then you get a blurry look.

So that's one of the issues. But something wonderful that happened is that we also got some new contributors. One of them is Prave and Kumar, who has been really a tremendous help here, locating these sort of places and sending in patches as well. So I think really by 6-7, this is going to be so much better. So obviously you've got people that are sort of interested in helping out here, but when you first announced that you were going to be doing this, what was that initial response like? Obviously, I saw the post and personally I was excited. I saw people in my comment section like, oh, this is cool. I don't know if I'm going to use it, but I think this is me and I hope it goes well. But, you know, being involved in the project, what was that response like? And did you expect any sort of response? Well, I had initially asked, you know, also in some of the KD groups, would it be our right to restore this theme and don't really said anything. And then I restored it and there was some thumbs down, some comments.

Yeah. But I realized what the mistake here was. It was my mistake because I came in and I hadn't been active in KD for a few years and then I came in, restored something that is extra maintenance. And then I didn't say, okay, I'm going to work on this, I'm going to fix it up. And then from the point of view of people that are really overworked because I know how much they work, this just looks like something, the extra work that they're going to get because someone merged something like that. So I think I just should have communicated it better. But once I, you know, set up, set the whole thing up as a project,

the response to become so much more positive. if you look at the issues, tasks on Katie and Ben, it has a lot of thumbs up, and the reactions on the internet have been just amazing. It's just great to see, yeah. Yeah, I did see that initial sort of like, I don't know if it was like, it wasn't anger, right?

It wasn't anger than Katie. I think you're right there. It's just like, why are you doing this? This just doesn't make any sense. Like, this is just like, the theme's broken. Like, why are you even trying, right? And I get it.

Yeah, I totally get that point. But it's actually been a lot more useful to merge the theme, even if it wasn't great, and then to work on it, as opposed to working on it on one person's computer. Because then everyone else can see the code. Other people chime in. They can send in their own merge request.

They don't have to know you be in touch with you. So this has been much more useful than the alternative would have been to sort of workline, perhaps, on my own computer. But this, I think, is going pretty well, yeah. If I recall correctly, there was a similar sort of response with plasma big screen when a bunch of developers started working on that. I don't know if you even paid attention to that. It's like a smart TV interface that KDE was doing years ago. And someone was like, okay, I'm just going to come along. and I'm just going to sort of work on this.

And it was in a, even when it got initially ported over to Plasma 5, it never really finished its design intentions to begin with. So it was sort of porting half-finished designs. And it, it very much like oxygen was like, there's a lot of work here. Are you going to like actually get the work done and not just like throw this on the people who are already, you know, busy doing other things.

That's exactly. That's the whole point because I know I'd been active in the KD community for. I was at one sprint. And I know how some of these people really have a lot on their plate and they don't need anything extra. So if you're coming in with something new, yeah, it's expected of you. You're going to finish the work and maintain it afterwards, not just leave. Because bug reports come in and someone has to solve them, right?

For sure, for sure. So that's sort of the response, like, within KDE, but like from just regular KDE users, people that saw the theme being worked on, like, what sort of response did you get from that? Wow, just so overwhelmingly positive, especially with your video and looking at all the comments below. Like, obviously you get people that like these themes and want to use them. If people aren't that interested, they're not going to comment. So, okay, there's a little bit of a bias there, but it's, so many nice comments and people being happy and saying they can't wait for six, seven.

And to me, that's what makes this worth it. Yeah, I'm probably going to have to actually give it a proper test. And I hope it's like, yeah, I'm sure there's going to be something that breaks. There's always something that breaks no matter what's being done, especially when you're, you know, porting something this old. But from what I've seen, it seems like it's already shaping. up to be in a relatively good state? Right.

I would say that about 80 to 90% things are okay. Like even if looking at the window decorations app style icon theme, plasma themes, right now in master, Katie, I think they're pretty usable at this point. You don't get any big glitches. There was some definite issues with the window decoration. If you've tried oxygen, you've got these weird, tool-tip backgrounds, transparent, and just like really things that stabuate in the face and make it look like it's not polished. But it's been worked on.

One thing that's important here is plasma switching whalen, and scaling works different there. So on X-11, the Oxygen App Style, it scales fine. but with Whalen, you get some glitches like there's still some things left to fix like like some handles in the, not the sliders, for instance. Like in sound settings, you go out? Yeah, that's actually part of the plasma theme.

That's fine. But the plasma theme, although it wasn't really maintained, like from a development point of view, it's not that big of a deal in the sense that you solve these SVGs and then you shouldn't be set. it's not like something should break. But with this more fragile code, more complex code, like application style, which is really complex and hard to work on.

And window decorations here, it's something that does require more maintenance. Something I think would be useful, just to people sort of have a better understanding, is what are the pieces of, like, a theme? Like, how does all of this fit together? What are the different parts that all need to sort of align to make it look correct.

All right. So this is this big topic of theming in KD, which is right now, it's fragmented. You know, you have these, I'm not sure what the official terminology is. Plasma styles maybe used to be desktop themes, plasma themes, whatever. This is this SVG-based components. Beaming system, that's one thing. Then you have the Q widgets. These are these mostly old, the native Q-D apps.

Then that has the app style, which is the most complex part of theming. Just one file, which is Oxygen style, is 8,000 lines of code. That's just one file. And it's really not the easiest code that people don't like working on that. What is the code written in? C++. But it's a special IQ painter code. It's challenging.

And then you have window decorations. That's also C++. And you also have to style theme the cute quick parts, which aren't the plasma theme, but it's like some apps like Discover. That's another thing, which right now is working, picking up the application style theme,

but not 100%. With oxygen, if you use it, you don't get the window gradient, for instance. So it's really complex, lots of pieces that need to fall into place here. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I can understand why this might be causing problems then. Had you, but before you took on this project, I am assuming you'd done some theming before,

unless you just, this is the first thing you hopped into? No, not quite. I was active in Katie, mostly in VDG. It was around the end of 20 tents. So not the first thing. And I did a little bit of design as well as a hobby when I was younger. so it wasn't completely new. And I also learned a little bit of programming,

not so much the C++ part, but the QML, that one's really approachable. So it gets me by, yeah. So there's obviously a lot of design language. Actually, you know, we'll start with that. There's obviously a lot of design language changes that have happened from 4 up to Plasma 6. and I'm assuming some of that stuff doesn't necessarily entirely map

and this has probably led to some I'm assuming there's areas where things that were done in KDE4 are no longer possible in Plasma 6 at least as the code was already written 100% correct even if you look at plasma themes if you grab a theme from KD4

you can delete at least a dozen SVGs because it's not applicable. I don't know if should I go into all the detail. For instance, in Katie, Go into the many details you want. You can put some sort of a texture behind the label that's on the desktop. So you had dark text and then there was some sort of a glow behind it. That thing's not possible anymore. And then I think it's important to say is with the air and oxygen plasma themes,

they're not going to be one-to-one replicas of what they were, precisely because of these technical changes. For instance, the blur effect isn't quite the same. It works differently nowadays, and you can't replicate quite the looks that you have then. Plus, like with the air theme, if you looked at it in KD4, it was super transparent, but it had no blur on desktop widgets, which things have changed today. If you look at contrast standards, it might fail the contrast standard. I'm looking at it now.

So some things had blur, but not, that's weird. So like the calendar didn't have blur, but there's like a, I'm looking at the first blog post. There's a thing that says, the folder is empty and that seems to have blur on it.

Right. I think the panel had blur, but the desktop widgets were missing blur. I'm not 100% sure, but that's just one example of an, infrastructure will change. Then there's a bunch of things that we're missing in these oxygen and everything. If you look at margin separators, so this thing was added in plasma, so you can make, I

know, your system tray a bit smaller, so it's not as big as the other icons. This adaptive opacity thing, like if you maximize your window, your panel becomes less transparent. So all of these features weren't supported by these themes, and the idea was let's add these features. of them was also these headers and footers. You see them in Kickoff, the application launcher. That thing existed in sort of a different way in KD4. I think it wasn't actually QML. I think it was actually like this native code. But now we added it to air because we thought it looked cool, but it wasn't something that's quite the same as it was in KD4. But at the same time, we don't want to change the design.

Right, right. So when you come across these things where you sort of have to make a choice, how do you sort of go about deciding which direction you go, whether you want it to be more in line with oxygen or, you know, like there's obviously going to be places where there's like a diverging path, right? How do you sort of decide on which path to go? Well, I have an easy solution here. Just ask the oxygen lead designer, Noonio Piner, who's around.

And I was asking him, what do you think? And I think his opinion has a lot of weight because he designed it. He knew what the idea behind it was. So whenever there's something like that, we try to consult with him. Yeah. But the general idea is let's keep the design similar. Let's not alter this. Let's not do something new.

but let's just fix it up so so it looks good and doesn't have any books. So it's a it's oxygen applied to plasma 6 it's not turning plasma 6 into KDE4. I guess a good way to look at it. Right, that's yeah, yeah, that's one way

of, yeah, yeah. Because there's like, with this being something that's not necessarily you know, a core theme to plasmut at this point. There's only so much you can do. You can't really make fundamental sweeping code changes to Plasma 6 just to sort of enhance this theme. There are things that might make sense to also add to Plasma 6 that happen to benefit this, but there's a framework you need to work within because Breeze is the core focus now. Yeah, obviously when sending in patches,

It can't downgrade the breeze experience. It has to make sure the default experience stays in touch. And then if this can also work well with oxygen, which has been the case with several patches we've been sending in, there's no issues. Or maybe even adding some new features. For instance, we're thinking with the icons. Some users say they don't want these monochrome icons in their system tray.

They want colorful icons. But technologically, we're limited right now with giving them the option, so we're thinking of why not have an option in the icon theme as well. You can click, okay, I want colorful icons there. But that's something we need to implement on the plasma side as well. So I guess long term with this theme, what do you want it to be? And where do you want to see it go? I think it's fine for Katie to offer multiple themes for a little, for some time now it's

been offering one that was the default. And maybe in Plasma 5, you could say the oxygen was also being offered. But this old oxygen, I think it's always going to have a market as a sort of vintage look that some users are interested in. You know, when you always go to these rising subredits or whatever, there's always someone with these retro looks. So I think it's always going to have its market. I don't know how quite big it is, but I think there is one.

Then you have the default look, which is supposed to be. this professional really polished clean look. And I think there's room for one more theme, which would be really out there, really try to do something, something that really tries to wow you, even if it might be risky and not liked by everyone. But a big topic here is also

this technological infrastructure. What's going to happen with that? Because we've gotten into this. Right now, theme is pretty complex in KD as probably, you know, this is project of KD Union, where you have something that can ingest, just for now at CSS, and then applies the theming everywhere, which is a brilliant idea and would make life easier for everyone.

For theming, it just needs to reach feature parity, right? Because you could, as as tiring it is and it's hard it is to work on, of this, for instance, C++ code, it's still very powerful. I feel like every time I have someone on who's involved in anything KDE design, the topic of union comes up.

And it's a really important topic, because as you've described, theming in plasma, theming in the KDU ecosystem is difficult. And, you know, I get why

there's this sort of desire to to unify something, this desire to try and do something about the problem because it's been a problem for a long time and it's a problem that seems to only get worse over time because, you know, maybe you had one or two things at one point

and then, you know, QML comes along at some point and then you have all of these other little things and do we disconnect? We good? Hello? Uh, you're Hello, hello. Oh, I can hear you now. Okay.

You're still phoking. Okay, okay, okay, sorry. Um, what did you last hear? Uh, just go over the last like half minute. Okay, okay. I was basically just saying that as... Everyone talks about you in the other area. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, sweet. Um, the problem sort of of, of KD theme has only gotten worse over the years. There's been additional ways of doing theming added. and I get it right like there's the the problem that exists within KDE is there's not like a dedicated push

for one system this is one of the things I think I think Gnome does do in a way that makes life simpler for everyone right they have the Ghanome design they have the way of doing it in Gnome and that's the way it's being done

whereas KDE there's like five different diverging things and everything somehow magically works together. There's been a lot of work to make it work together, but it's a complex mess for anyone who wants to build something on top of that. Right, and this happens in practice. So if you go and look what do you have the most of it, usually it's plasma themes, because this is the easiest to many people edit some SVGs and you have a bunch of plasma themes. Then I guess SDDM things have been a thing now.

this has been deprecated, so the theming of the login manager. But if you go and look at the application style, man, there's just so few of them because it's too complex. Usually they just then use, I don't know, breeze and then modify the color slightly. But if you want to do like

whole scale themeing. On the Kee store, there is 12. 12. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the same time, it's a difficult talk. was now you have all this third party ecosystem and what are you going to do with it? It's just going to delete this.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of users would be mad at this. So it's a big topic. Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure how it's going to develop, but it's super important for theming in the future. I think any sort of major rating change, they would have to come at like a new major release of Plasma. So a Plasma 7 or anything like that. But even so, right, there is this mentality, as you said, within plasma of wanting this power to be there. And it's a difficult problem to fix. I think union is the, I think union is sort of the least controversial way to approach the problem,

because it doesn't break any of the existing ways of doing theming. If you still want to do the older ways that get very deep into the ways you can do, that, but for building something in a considerably simple way, there is something that is easier to work with. Right, and that's the question here. Is union going to exist alongside the existing theming option, or is it going to try to eventually replace them so you don't have these any more? Which I don't know the answer to yet, but from what I want to say is that it's really important

that if it does try to replace, that it has to match the theming power that the current system offers. Yeah, I do completely agree there. I think there is a... Plasmus had this sort of legacy of theming for so long now, people look at this as this like... Even though it's complex,

this like beacon of what you can do. You know, you can build something that looks like basically identical to Windows 7 if you really want to, or Windows 95, or any version of OSX, or anything else you can think of. And if that power wasn't there, like, I'm sure there's a lot of people within plasma who would miss as well, maybe Breeze is, you know, it's the focus, but, you know,

for people outside of the design group, right, you know, they're going to play around with other things. They're going to mess. Maybe they like the plasma functionality, but not necessarily the look, right? So something I really like about plasma is this, there is this sort of, I guess, large diversity of opinions on what the correct direction to take things in actually is. Yeah, and I think that's fine if we're united in this diversity. And Katie is a great community in the sense that you oftentimes do come across people you don't necessarily agree with. but one of these people have any bad intentions and you have to try to understand their point

like with, for instance, this negative reaction to restoring air, for instance. You know, we could just say, you know, they meant something bad by it, but they didn't. You have to understand their point of view. Yeah, I pretty much agree there. So what is the current state of things? Like, what's been done?

What still needs to be worked on? Oh, for oxygen and air. So the plasma themes are a lot of things have already been fixed. Like with oxygen, it was so bad really that maybe it shouldn't even have been ship. It was really, really buggy. Like, for instance, there's the panel situation. I couldn't believe this. I use a bottom panel.

I got used to it. Flooding or attached to the bottom? Sorry, attach to the bottom. Okay, okay, yep. And if with the oxygen plasma theme, if you, it's designed directionally. So it's a glow that comes from below. And if you move your panel up, it would still be a glow coming from below. If you moved it vertically, it would switch into just one weird line glow in the middle

that goes from the bottom to the top because the design wasn't at all taking into account panel orientations. So these sort of things. And then oxygen tasks as well, there's a little line underneath. And again, a glow that goes from below. All of this needed adjusting. First of all was the bug fixing, like with the color scheme, making sure there's no light text on light background and so on. And then we looked at adding these features.

So the panel has been revamped. It supports this adaptive opacity and margin separators. With air, we actually added all the components for adaptive opacity, but it's not turned on right now because air relies a lot on transparency, and when it goes into a fully opaque state, it just doesn't look really great. I mean, but the files are there. If users are going to want to use this, they can just add one line to the plasma RC theme file that can use adaptive opacity.

With air, there was actually not a lot of bucks to fix. If you go and I have a virtual machine of KD4 and I just stole the theme files from there. If you apply it to modern-day plasma, it still works. It's not unusable at all. Oxygen is all kinds of broken, but air actually works. And here was just a matter of fixing like some squished elements. The search bar was way too, way too short. The view items were squished and so on.

And then the rest was just about adding the features like also. margin separators, for instance, that it supports blur. One big thing here was the air of Plasma 5 really wasn't representative of old air because it wasn't transparent enough. And to get there, this was an interesting journey. We obviously dialed down the increased the transparency, added blur. But then we saw like some weird smudging around edges. And this is where the Katie veteran Marco Martin really helped us and patched this stuff. up. So the current look is pretty good. It's not one-to-one replica of KD4, but I think users are going to like it. One of the things I see on the brainstorming list is consider having these

themes support accent color. What's that about? Yeah, I mean, if you use oxygen in air, it's just blue. It has blue as an accent color. Right. There's just one ice blue, and then there's like a darker blue and let's say you want your whole system to be in the pink colored or green color and oxygen doesn't support this right now so uh this something that we should and i think we will add by by six seven just so if you have a blue glow that it's if you if you use a pink accent color it's going to be pink that's another modern feature that is probably expected of most themes nowadays. It wasn't the case, like maybe 15 years ago, but now it is. Right, this kind of goes into the additional functionality added since then,

and it's something that you expect to be working, right? The option is there in the KDE setting, so if it doesn't do what you expect, then that just feels wrong. Sorry, what do you mean about which part? Oh, not having the accent color. right? If the accent color doesn't behave like you'd expect it to, if you know you set it and then it's like, oh, you highlight text in a browser and it's using the accent color, but then it's not using it in the actual, you know, interface, it doesn't align with what you expect from, you know, using Breeze, for example. Right. And this is, you know, what happens sometimes in practice is that bug reports come in for regular plasma. We're actually something like oxygen bugs. So another. part of maintenance thing. So if this is properly maintained, works right, that doesn't happen.

Yeah, but it should be. If your accent color is maybe generated from the wallpaper as well, or completely dynamic, and you want to see this in the theme as well. There's also been some users that wanted the whole theme to be tinted, like, you know, if you use a background color in your application style, that's, I don't know, yellowish, the whole plasma theme should be tinted. but that's not something we're looking at right now at least for 6-7 maybe it's sort of an option or yeah there's been a lot of comments

by users and reading all of them trying to find ways to make everyone happy that's something I think would be really really cool I don't know how much complexity it adds to the theme itself but it would be really neat

Yeah, I guess I see the appeal of it But at the same time in all these conversations With Muno Pinedo and also some other folks that joined in the group And have been sending some links about the history There was some sort of an idea, I think, that Oxygen is like a black gemstone or something like that And then here is like glass So if it's like supposed to be a black gemstone

And it's like a yellow one And it's not quite what they had in mind, but that's what options are for and we'll look into this. We can also, for instance, for oxygen curses, you have some extra curses in the repo right now, but it's not installed by default. So this could be done for other things. Like some people have been asking about classical design. Like, you know, the old oxygen panel was a gradient. It was very 2009. Some people want this look.

and I mean we can't ship like two three oxygen themes but maybe we could leave it around in the report uploaded to the KD store so if people want this look so they can use it right you have to kind of like make decisions about what the core look is going to be and any additional things you add to it

are going to add additional complexity to it And I totally get wanting to sort of, at least for the initial release, really define the scope of what you're trying to do. And from there, you can play around with ideas. If something works, if something doesn't. Like, you know, you always make those decisions later down the line. Exactly. And that's in pipeline for 6-8.

And then when users install 6-7, they're going to, they can experience this theme and they can file. report so we'll also see the user feedback there and then. So if somebody wants to go and like play around with it right now, what is the easiest way to go and do so? Depends if you're a KD developer, you just do KD builder, Oxygen. It compiles the whole repo. If you're a regular user and you're on some point release or I don't know,

plasma 6-5-66, you can download the theme files that I have in the block post and install them locally. There might be some bugs because, like, for instance, switches were broken before 6.63. I think this is actually what I wanted to say is an advantage when you have other themes that are somewhere in the system is you see some things that they might work well with Brees, but then another theme exposes that it doesn't work right. And that was the case with the switch. That was actually something being drawn underneath the switch,

but you didn't see this in Breeze because the handle goes over the switch, right? Uh-huh. So I see. So there was sort of like a mistake or a hack done with Breeze, and it's just something that nobody really noticed because Breeze looked correct. It's an honest mistake with the components code where just, you know, you test it with Breeze, and you didn't see that, you know, if you remove the big handle, if you want to do a slider,

inside the groove, it's not going to look right. Right. But yeah, if users want to test this, these files are available, it's, I would say, like, 80, 90% done, but should be usable. There's some things to work out. Like, users may notice that Air has a lot of spacing with task items. Like, they're really spaced apart. And oxygen, they're more close together.

There's something also to synchronize a bit. better. So, have you, like, I don't know if this was around or not. Have there been other, I guess, themes inspired by oxygen or other attempts to revive it as like less official things that just somebody sort of playing around with the idea? Well, yeah, I'm actually glad you asked that because when we were getting into this project, we actually saw a lot of third party like forks, repos, people, working, doing really good stuff and you're just contacting all of them asking, hey, why don't

you upstream this? You know, why not benefit the official oxygen package? So, so there is. There is actually one person who was working on the oxygen, like acute quick style. So that applies to all of these like apps like Discover, for instance. So you get the gradient in the background. From what I know, it wasn't quite finished. And the person said it wasn't a state to be upstream. But like for people working on forks of the oxygen theme, if you have any fixes for them, like for instance, with the accent color or something, just send in a patch. And it benefits everyone really, yeah. So how many people at this point are kind of messing around with the theme? Because you mentioned

you have like the person who was like the core designer of oxygen involved in this, but how many other people are involved? What are different people working on? Oh, man, Nune Pinero, so he was the lead designer for oxygen. He's doing so much work with oxygen icons right now. He's produced, like, I don't have the number, but it's insane. If you look at the commit history, he's just generated so many, especially symbolic icons, so everything falls into place. Then he's helped by Praven Kumar, who's also, who I think we also found with someone who had a fork, his own repo, and he really fixed a lot of things up, especially with icons, and then he already had the know-how. He knew what

need to be fixed, and he sent them in these patches. This was brilliant. And now, one of the biggest excitements I get these days is when I rebuild oxygen icons, and I see, oh, this has been fixed. That's been fixed. Yeah, there's also, there's this telegram group, and there's also some other folks there that comment. Some might also join in with patches, but we also have these season KD developers that help around a lot. So it's a small group, I would say, but we get the job done. Because a lot of this work has already been done. And I'm the face that's in front of you, but so many more people have contributed more

to oxygen. And especially, like I would point out, these KD developers for Plysm 5, Plasma 6, because they just did so quietly, you know. Actually, I'm kind of curious specifically about Nino Piniero. Like, when you started working on this, like, how did you, did you contact him beforehand? Did you realize he was the one who had done the work?

What was his sort of response to you wanting to bring this work back? Yeah, I had, of course, known of him, but I knew he was sort of in my mind. It was this design legend of Katie. I knew he was the elite designer for Oxygen. I saw him in some of the, some of the groups like the visual design room from time to time popped in, but never actually had a real chance to speak to them, work with them.

Then what happened is when I started submitting these patches, and especially when I restored air, and Noon commented below, I would like to help with this, and then I got in touch, hey, what do you have in mind, and then joined the group. And ever since then, it's been amazing, really, so beautiful thing that came out of this, is to get a chance to work with them and see how it does this. For instance, he's working on a camcorder icon these days, and when you see him how he constructs all of these complex pieces of it, it's truly amazing.

That's awesome. No, that is definitely really cool. Honestly, it's cool to see someone who's just excited about working on just a neat theme like this, right? It's not something that most people are going to, like, switch. right? I don't think it's going to be this sudden design interest shift where everyone wants to shift back to the oxygen look but I do think that it is a really

cool theme and I do like the fact that this is being brought into the modern era of plasma and being something where even if something you just want to try out and see okay

what were they going for and it's not exactly the same, but what were they going for with KDE for and do I like this, right? Do I see something here? And I think something interesting is, as a example for the people in KD design, are there things that maybe we've gone too far with minimalism? Is there something we can learn from the work that we had done in the past that we can use to improve the design of Breeze today? Because I know there are certainly some interest within the design group to play around some things in Breeze and improve some things like there's ideas that are always floating around and knowing what you've done in the past can sort of I guess direct you for what to do in the future yeah absolutely but

I think Breeze is at this moment pretty much more or less frozen and it's going to be replaced by the ocean theme right yeah sorry yeah ocean forgot about that one ocean yeah Sort of its successor, but not an iteration, but it's its own thing. Yeah, I think also, as I said, this positive reaction to oxygen, I think there's really a sizable amount of users who want these non-flat looks, maybe some lows, gradients, some depth or whatever. I don't think it's going to go back to what it was, obviously. It's in a weird sort of mixture state right now.

Like, you have this, for instance, what's the trend, a liquid glass. It does evoke that time, but again, it's its own thing. Then, for instance, material design, it seems to be more in this flat still, still trend. But, yeah, I think these old themes can, they're useful. And the fact that people like them, I think, yeah, we can, it could be, some of the things can be adapted for future themes. On the, on the topic of liquid glass, I know a lot of people had a very, like, negative reception to it. And I think there were definitely a lot of problems with it with, like, um, uh, contrast and things like that.

The early looks of it were pretty rough, especially if you're using it on a light theme. It just, I don't think they really fully tested it before they let people play around with it. And that gave a very bad reception to it. Right, because I also think times have changed. It was like, I don't know, 2008, and I don't know, maybe I don't remember, but people weren't firing up contrast checkers and much. I think things are, there's a lot more sensitivity to accessibility these days, so you get eligible text. I don't think some of the designs, like, if you look at, especially from that era, they were super transparent, and then text is a little bit hard to read. I don't think this didn't fly as any sort of default offering anymore.

I'm not that acquaintant with liquid glass, but from what I saw, the issue was, for instance, that all of the icons turned to the same color. So you have on your phone, and they were colorful icons, and you could use these colors to locate your app. And it's all the same color from a usability point of view. Although I do think it looks cool. It's one of those latest designs that at least I might not co-sign it completely, but I'm intrigued by it. I stop and look at it, just like at an old building, and you look at the weird faces on the facade. Right, it felt like for a long time,

designers were kind of afraid to try out anything, right? It was like, this is the design language, everything's flat, everything's a single color, and even if it's not something everyone vibes with, I like the fact that they at least are trying something and trying to like diverge from what everyone else was doing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I completely agree.

You brought up the topic of accessibility there. I'm actually kind of curious, like, what issues have cropped up there with oxygen. And obviously, nowadays, caring about contrast and making sure the text is readable, is a really important thing. And as we saw with, you know, some of the design choices with air, you would not design it today, right? There was a lot of light text on light backgrounds that just would not fly with any modern design. Yeah, but there was actually some more variance of air, which I discovered. There was like this initial one that had these sort of even circles in backgrounds, if you look at the widget backgrounds.

And then there was a version called AirNet Book, which was pretty much air, but it had some sort of a gradient in the panel and so on. But some versions, and you see this in the screenshots, were pretty transparent. And in these plasma themes, you have this, I think, SVG file, translucent background. And someone in the comments somewhere asked, can we restore this? I mean, no, like from technological point of view, not just even if we're talking about contrast, I don't know a way to restore this sort of extreme transparency without making everything else

transparent. Like there's not an extra checkbox but for make it extra transparent. Hmm. Hmm. So what is the sort of release plans for this? You mentioned a couple of times, Plasma 6-7. Yeah, I guess like when can people expect this to be

not maybe 100% done, but something that is ready to play around with. I think 6-7 is absolutely the goal. That's going to be the milestone. And then after 6-7, it's a matter of tweaking things to, based on user input, if they want something a little bit different, something extra, I think.

But I think in 6-7 it's going to be completely, it's going to look, you know, presentable. It's going to look, shouldn't look bugged anymore. So pretty soon, yeah, there's two months left, but the development window, there's a soft freeze that's come to the end of April, and then if you add some strings, you also have to keep this in mind. So development-wise, not too much time left. For buck fixes, there's always, that can always go in.

Like for big features, and something that we're also looking at is to create an air, global theme, look and feel theme. I don't know what's called these days. And maybe offer some new color schemes as well. Right now you have oxygen, you have oxygen cold. These are pretty vintage. Maybe offer oxygen dark as well. It's a dark theme.

I don't know if people use like light apps themes and dark panel theme these days. I'm under the impression that they use it in sync. And maybe a color scheme for air as well, like a light one. Yeah, I don't know anyone who, I didn't even know you could mix them. Can you still mix them? Like have a light panel and a dark applications? Yeah, you get plasma theme that's hard-coded, so to speak, in dark color. And then you use a color scheme that's like, you can do it.

You can do it with oxygen now? I don't personally do it. I don't see the point like aesthetically or the usability-wise, but there might be a subset that does this. But this was in KD4 with oxygen, the default color scheme is light, and then the panel was dark, not in case of air, but you didn't have oxygen dark. You have these plethora of themes called honeycomb, Norway,

a wonton soup obsidian coast that have been deprecated since Okay, so there's a lot more of a continuum of like What did some of those look like, I guess? Oh, well, some of them were really out there. I can send in the link

somewhere because there's also also actually, if you go to the oxygen repo, there's a merge request some even older color schemes. Some of them, I think, are even like green like matrix. like, you know, it was, it was a different time. It was a time, like, you remember, like a lot of things could comply that couldn't quite today.

It was more playful, though, and that's what I like. That probably would have been around the time that Steam had the green theme. So I guess it kind of makes sense. Yeah, there's a, some of them are, like, ordinary, like, by today's standards, but some of them, like, I think Honeycomb was, like, something, extra orangee with the highlight. They're pretty interesting. And there's actually a link somewhere.

I think it's in the merger quest as well. That describes there's actually a story behind them. It's not just a color scheme, but it's like an obsidian coast and we wanted to show this and that with it. It's very interesting. I think that's something we've been missing, especially that we lost in 2010s,

and we still haven't returned, is this sort of a little bit of playfulness, a little bit of charm, personality. like don't maybe like do the clipies that pop out or the candles or the cockies whatever but just a little something you know quirky

you and there could be useful right yeah for a long time it's really been this you have the white theme and you have the black theme and that's kind of all that was there and you know if you go back to

even if you go back to like XP right you know you had the You had the gradient in the file manager, like the blue ribbon thing. Like, there was more to the design. You had, wasn't the, was the panel blue back then on Windows? I don't remember. There was definitely a lot more usage of color. And I think moving into this material design, moving to this flat design,

there has been a shift away from that. I think a big part of that is because of accessibility, because you really want to care, you really want to matter that, like, contrast is important. Sorry, I'm terrific my words. Contrast is important, and the easiest way to handle that

is black text, white background, white text, black background. That's going to give you your contrast requirements. It's also a naturally good-looking design, right? You can tint the dark grey, a little bit blue, and now you have this modern, like, metallic design. It looks nice. But doing something outside of that,

actually having a color scheme that uses color that actually looks good is really difficult. And you really did understand color theory to make that work. Yeah, it is. It's super difficult. And I think, again, this is this topic. It's okay. Let's have a default look off of the white, dark experience.

but it's KD, you can also offer this extra options if someone wants to use them, they can choose to use them. But yeah, I haven't personally myself, like, there's one theme there, a color scheme is called cherry blossom, I think. And if you apply it in your system and everything is like pink cherry blossom tint, it looks cool. Oh, wait, is that what I saw, okay, I saw someone using oxygen and it was, Tinted all, is that like what that is?

I presume? Might be. I'm not sure. Okay. But design-wise, it is hard to pull off today without, but yeah, even like you mentioned Windows XP, but I think of Windows 98 and all the themes you could do there. There was something like with textures even, like no one does this anymore, like add like

wood panel texture in your panel. Right. Yeah, yeah. Looks weird, but yeah, I think the default look, it's still, the times will limit, it has to remain, you know, it has to be consistent and accessible, whatnot. It can quite go back to the playfulness levels we saw before, but a little bit, I think, could be restored. What other thing you necessarily need to ship the playfulness yourself? I think something that I would expect to happen. is once you provide the framework, other people are going to sort of build these third-party things that just, you know, do not fit within Plasma.

They're never going to be shipped in a core repo, but build off of the framework that has been provided here and really explore what can be done. Because once you have oxygen in a state where it's working like it should be with plasma, now you provide a really good point to fork off of and do your own thing. Yeah, exactly. And I think, I really think this whole third party ecosystem with all that's out there, with the broken SDDM themes and whatnot, it's beautiful to me. That's what makes Katie special. Yeah.

Yeah, the broken themes especially. There's some choices that have been made out there. The themes that steal your passwords and whatnot. Maybe not those ones. Keep those ones away. That is a concern with having it. This goes deep. There was the whole, like, how many years ago was it now?

I feel like it was only like last year. But there was the whole global theme that, Did it like delete someone's system? I don't remember what the case was. Oh, I think it did. Yeah. I think it did, uh, RM, RF on the, it was like, from what I read, it was like a, something that worked differently in Plasma 5 and then when it was used in Plasma 6,

it deleted absolutely everything. Um, this, how long ago was this? This was March 20th, 24. Oh my God. a while ago. Okay. I talked about this when it happened. I didn't realize it was that long ago.

Yeah, it wasn't malicious. It was just code that had not been imported. Yeah. Okay. Like, that is a problem with having themes be built

with C++, right? Be built with arbitrary code. There's going to be places where either malicious developers, or it's just things have changed a bit. And a great example of this actually is an ancient problem that Steam had, where they had a shell script and it ran an RMRF, but it didn't check if the variable it was using was set.

So if the variable wasn't set, it ended up just doing an RMRF on your route. And obviously that went badly. It wasn't malicious, right? 99% of the time it was fine the environment variable was set. I think it was related to if you moved your Steam folder, it just had the,

it didn't properly set the variable for whatever reason it was doing it like that and it just deleted things. But that is the problem with having, you know, having full programming languages to do things. Yeah, yeah. With great power comes to your responsibility.

That's what happens here. It's like SDDM things or QML and it's not just, you know, just style things with them. There's logic in there, and it's easy to mess this up. Especially things change and you don't adjust for the new versions, and then you end up with a broken screen, which is the least of your concerns up, even if there's someone stealing your passwords.

So I get where they move from that to Plasma Logging Manager. It's a loss for theming, though, because you can't theme your login manager anymore. Oh, you can't. SDM is still around, but I get the security concerns, yeah. Yeah, okay, that's, that is kind of sad, right? You know, I, there was cool stuff on the KV store. I know, yeah, and you can't do that with the new thing.

Well, I think it would be really cool to have the plasma login, like, you know, from login all the way to using it, having it be that auctioning design. Like, that would be super cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's no, even SDDM theme, there's this called Ellorone theme that you might think is oxygen, but this is actually shipped with SDDM that was done there in like 2013, and hasn't been touched on. Very simple theme.

And we can't change this because SDDM is so slow moving. If you send in a patch, this may come out like in two, two, three years. And then with plasma logger manager, you can't, you can't theme it. So for the login experience right now, it's not in the ideal state where if you want a really cohesive thing from the login all the way to the minutia. You're a bit of a pickle. Hey, if somebody wants to go on foreclosba login manager do something fun there. Hey, you know, that's the fun with open source. Someone can go do so.

Yeah, I think there is supposedly some plan to make it a little bit more. themeable, it's stylable in the sense that you can apply your icon theme or whatnot, but you can't like rearrange the whole login to be something else. Yeah, okay. Half screen or whatever.

That would be QML code. But I'm not fully like knowledgeable about this, so I'm just going off from what I read. Right, right. There's definitely a, there's definitely things you could do

that don't involve like, you know, full-on C++ that would at least provide something there, right? You know, it feels out of place for there to be absolutely nothing, but at the same time, I understand why you would want to do so. And even when it comes to, you know, images, right, there have been cases of weird code exploits with images, and this is a part of the reason why Ubuntu decided to just drop image support in Grub, like there are cases where you can do weird things that shouldn't be possible loading code through an image.

It's generally not going to happen, but there's sometimes something weird, you know, bad code can do bad things, right? Right, yeah. There's been some examples. It's rare in the Linux world, but it does happen. Yeah, so I get this point, but maybe like then, because obviously the briefs, theme is now that would what everyone's going to see with Plysmolagon manager, maybe somehow make the theme itself, the code, modal, like adjustable so that it loads certain things based on a theme that can alter them. I don't know. It would require

a significant rework of the current theme. I know because I worked on this theme like seven or eight years ago, but that might be one way. Like the same way that you, you load SVGs with plasma themes that maybe like or set some parameters like, okay, where do I want these avatars to be? Might be dual, but it is, it's a lot of work. Right. And it's a lot of work that whether or not it's even something they'd want to support in phyzman logging management.

It's one thing to provide the patches and do it. But again, it's like we're saying before, right? If you're going to do that, that opens a whole. new, a whole new maintenance vector and then somebody has to deal with that and, you know, it's, it's messy. You know, code is messy, projects are messy. Yep, yeah. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes, but yeah, it's also one topic for theming right now.

If you want to make the login screen something, you have to use SDDM. It's still, it's still around. I think it should be around for our. a few more years, but also it was helped out a lot by KD maintainers as well. So we'll see how it shapes up. But I think ultimately, like your first initial step, focusing on getting the theme ready, and then anything from there can continue on from that point, right?

Like, there's no point trying to do everything at once before you ship anything. No, no, no, no. I mean, I think this, the way things laid off for oxygen now is saying, just first fix everything up and then see see where it goes from there. I mean, like even like on a personal side, I have a day job and I just do this in my free time. So there's so many, I know like I have a big test list in my head. And if I went and did that, I have to be doing it all day.

I guess with that, like when do you decide that things are kind of ready? Like, what is your criteria for that? Well, you send in these patches and ideally people test them. They try out what you did and say, this is okay. Then that's the first line of testing. Second line is you push it to master. So you have this community of KD developers that keeps rebuilding their packages. Then they can see if something got messed up because people have different setups.

someone has Nvidia, someone has AMD, someone uses a scale. Someone doesn't. That's then, that happens. And then you have these distros that are super fast. That's one way of testing. So it's an iterative process. But like your, like, what I sort of meant there was your criteria for when the theme is ready, right? They obviously want to get it to be done by Plasma 6-7, but there's obviously going to be issues that are more critical than others, right?

Like there are some things where even if it wasn't fixed, it would be kind of fine to just ship. And it's a very minor, subtle issue. Yeah, it's mostly, this is the stuff that's in the domain of what users I've been asking, like some extra options, colorful icons and panels, I don't know, tinting all over. But I think the core, crucial things are already there. What bugs kind of exist still? with the theme. Like, if somebody was to run it today, you said most of it's pretty much fine,

but like, there's clearly still problems. Yeah, one thing, if someone's tested out, the air theme, and you go and do your logout, and all of a sudden the text isn't very legible, that's an issue, but it can be worked around in the air theme because the logout screen is hard-coated black now, and the air loads its colors based

on the light environment. it's in. So it loads the color for button labels. And then this doesn't look good on the logout screen. So the logout screen needs to be patched for a legible text with air. And this isn't just the problem with air. It's a problem with if you switch, try switching to Breeze light right now. If you're on, I don't know, some 6-6 version and go do a logout, you'll see that text isn't very legible. Certainly doesn't satisfy any contrast criteria. I think it's very, very, clear. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's very clear what the default theme for the designers

were with Breeze. If there's issues with like Breeze light, it's very clear that Breeze dark was the core focus. Or just the Breeze default that, I don't know, adjust itself based on color scheme because the breeze light is just coded to always be light. So yeah, so people were to, people usually tests with reason this is understandable because it takes extra time

to cycle through everything. But it is really useful. It can be useful, not just for other things, but exposing exactly these sort of things that are actually bugs in the code. And ultimately like this is the point of getting something out there.

This is the point of like doing user testing because you're going to have obviously the developers try things out. But the real point where you're going to know that something is wrong is when it's out there and somebody does some weird combination of things that you never thought of testing. Yeah, and then there's a post on Reddit and, you know this one that was really popular recently was someone was using the oxygen theme and then they fired up a menu or something and then it showed

there's two white hard-coded pixels in the shadow. I don't know if you've seen this. No, what happened with you? If you sort by most upload it, it's really up there. Yeah. Some things that are there, but you don't necessarily even see. Is that on the KD Reddit? Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Sort by top, maybe. Maybe I'll go to find it. Probably won't. In the last month or two months.

Oh, okay. In the last month or two, I won't be able to find it quickly then. It doesn't matter, but it was pretty funny, you know, because this is, two little pixels that everyone was joking. Like, oh, yeah, this is, this is really, you should deprecate oxygen. It's too bad, man. Yeah, no, that's, yeah, again, this is the, this is the point of using the testing.

Something like that, like, you know, it's easy to miss that, right? It's one of those little things where, you know, I kind of get how if you're not looked, if you don't know it's there, you're not going to see it. And especially if you're, if you're messing with it constantly, it can be very easy to stop noticing problems. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this, I think the user did even a special test scenario where they put a white background behind it, like a plain color of wallpaper that you don't, don't even do it. So some like with normal wallpapers, you might not even notice some things like bad shadows. Scaling is a big thing where people have figured different scaling, things can turn out wrong.

Yeah. And X-11, well, still being used for some people. And I accidentally was trying to fix some shadows and accident and breaking X-11, which wasn't good thing. It's not the whole X-11, but like oxygen on X-11. Right, right. Because it's still supported, it's going to be until 6-8, I think.

Right. People have different scaling. People have weird monitor resolutions. You know, I'm sure there's going to be, you know, if it's not been tested with a super ultra-wide, who knows, maybe if the panel

is like this long, something weird happens with the rendering. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Usually, I think a lot of these experiences, but that Katie developers come across is with Nvidia and AMD, like these differences, proprietary drivers and so on.

That can be really also tough to track down. From Mike. Maybe even someone. Oh, gone. Yeah, sorry, someone's using it, like on a tablet or I don't know, anything like a touchscreen. Something doesn't work. And I don't have a touchscreen here.

And I didn't test with that. Not what I was going to mention, but I guess it is relevant there. Plasma mobile. Oxygen, I think. I'm not sure if that's supported. I don't work on plasma mobile, but I actually saw that someone made an Android theme, imported oxygen as an Android theme for some launcher. if you go look at oxygen on Reddit or Android or something,

I think it was someone managed to do it. And it actually looked cool. I liked it. Okay, there's another thing. Okay, it's like, hot way, is this it? Yeah, okay, I found it. That's actually kind of sick. It's going to need to charge his phone.

He's at 23%, but, no, that actually is super cool. maybe I'll have to play around with that I don't know but what I was going to say is one of the areas where I've noticed that problems appear and I don't think it would be a case with this but whenever I try out a new desktop

I typically find problems with vertical monitor stuff randomly there's like little you know when I when Cosmic was an alpha for example they had a bug where their screenshot tool expected a horizontal display

and the screenshots were always horizontal so if you had a vertical display it would go with the horizontal resolution and only capture the top half of the monitor so it didn't expect the monitor to be rotated and just took like you know that half and it's a dumb little bug because no one had tested the screenshot tool with vertical monitors

um okay and it's Vertical monitors. Yeah, like, I get it, right? Like, you know, it's not the orientation that most people are going to be using. But it is something which probably should be supported. And I feel like I've spotted something in plasma at one point like that. And it, my main point here is that people are going to do things that you don't do, right?

And there's going to be something that shows up. And it's going to be fun. It's going to be a funny little problem. It might not be a major problem. It might not be something that is like, theme breaking, but it's always, it's always, you know, interesting to see the different setups that people have and how things can go wrong. But it does add a lot of complexity into actually making things work. Yeah, and just whenever someone finds a bug, just report them on

the, on the KD bug reporter and we'll have a look at it. Even if it's something like a feature request or something, you know, it's really some minor things. You don't even see like someone noticed that the KD logo was smaller with the oxygen team. the other panel icons. Just anything, yeah, it's appreciated. That's what makes the software better. That's how I started contributing.

First, part of the bugs. So, I feel like we pretty much covered like everything I wanted to talk about. Is there anything that maybe you think is important that we didn't touch on? I wouldn't say, I think we touched on a lot of things and managed to cover these, what's been happening with oxygen,

in air. I would just like to ask people if they're interested in this. They can contribute. They can join the telegram group that's linked in the blog post that I made. Can just be a spectator or but especially if you have some something, especially if you've been working on like something like a fork or something, just feel free to send in a merge request or just come chat with us. Okay. Yeah, I guess thank you for doing this. I had a lot of fun. I hope people learn at least something about oxygen or plasma theming or anything of the sort.

And, yeah. Yeah, thanks for having me and for covering these themes and for putting them in the spot play. Yeah, thank you for working on this. And I will be, when this is ready, I will be sure to play around with it. And I will probably make a video or do a stream on it Because it is cool to see something that is just, it's just fun, right?

It's just a fun, different look, and it's bringing back the legacy that Plasma had. Even though maybe people may not supervise with it, it's something which has historical value. And I personally think is cool. Yeah, just using it but also working on it. So thanks and I'll be looking forward to your next review. Awesome. Do you have anything else you want to say? Any way you want to direct people to?

I'll link your blog down below, but there's anything else you want to direct people to? No, just this blog post and there's a bunch of links there for people want to follow any of that. Okay. You also have links to go and support KDE, so go do that as well if you like that as well. not only this work, but just general work that goes on the project. Yeah, it's an awesome community. And the KDEV can then help, like, developers if they don't have, like, for instance, vertical monitors or some extra software that they need that's niche.

It's really appreciated, both contributing time and financially as well. Awesome. And if you want to test this out, I'll report bugs. Go to the bug tracker. And there's a lot of categories to pick from on the bug tracker, but it's fine. work out. That's why I gave the direct link to the oxygen category because if you go on the general page, there's a lot. Yeah. That's a whole other topic for somebody else. But the bugzilla is, it's overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah. I just do CTRL left and then try to find normally. Yeah.

I'm not my way around it. Okay. Nothing else you want to say? That's pretty much it? No, no. Thank you again, and I'll be seeing you. Sweet. I'll do my outro and then we'll sign off.

Okay, great. My main channel is Brodie O'Brien. I do Linux videos there six each days a week. Sometimes I stream as well. It's been awesome of streams, so I'll have to get around to that eventually. I've got the gaming channel that is Brodyon Games. I'm not sure what are we playing.

Maybe I'm done with the games, but as of the recording, I'm playing through Metal Gear Solid and Shenmu 2. So probably Metal Gear Solid 2? I don't know. Check it out, see what's there, and have some fun. If you're watching the video version of this, you'll find the audio version, or basically every podcast platform at Tech Over T on Spotify. We also have videos, so check that out if you like.

If you want the audio, obviously Spotify, but we're on pretty much every podcast platform, and there is also an RSS feed, so grab that if you like RSS feeds. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign herself? What do you want to say? Katie is awesome. Try and test these themes out and let us know if you find anything that you think can be approved. And thank you again for having me here.

Absolute pleasure.