Tech Over Tea - Designer Behind KDE's Oxygen Theme | Nuno Pinheiro

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Today we have Nuno Pinheiro the mind behind KDE 4's Oxygen theme who is now back on the project for the revival of the theme withing KDE Plasma 6 and he's here to talk about that effort and design in general.==========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==========Oxygen2: https://invent.kde.org/pinheiro/oxygen2Return of Oxygen: https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/halfway-there-to-6-7-updates-on-oxygen-and-air/==========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 you as your host, Brody Robertson. And today, we have someone who, you might know some of his previous work. Maybe you don't. This is Nuno Pignero, who has been involved in KD design for a while, and maybe you recognize him from his prior work on oxygen,

or maybe his recent work on oxygen as well. Welcome to the show. Hello. Hi. How's it going? Good. How's it? I guess, yeah, for anyone who's unaware of who you are and what you do, that was a relatively brief introduction, but I'm sure you've done plenty of other things as well.

Right. So, by trade, this is, okay, I like to tell this story. By trade, I'm a civil engineer. That's my thing. Well, was my thing. And then, how does one come into the midst of open source? So I was trying to, after college, I was in construction sites, I didn't like that too much, it was fine. But it's not my cup of tea.

I thought, okay, I'm going to do a nonlinear analysis of structural elements. And I'm going to do my own thing, right? So like when you're a kid and you don't know anything, you do, you think these sort of things, right? So I thought, okay, I'm going to learn C++. Easy stuff, right? Sure. Sure. I learned C++ don't know.

Okay, let's talk. This is not today when you actually have a lot of resources. This is 22 years ago. 22 years ago, internet was flaky at best. So if you want to learn C++, you buy books and things like that. And you train on open source. I decided to train open source because there's a lot of people there. They're going to help me, blah, blah, blah.

So yeah, I started learning C++ because I'm going to do my own matrix calculations, all of that. Yeah, crazy. Yeah, not knowing things is the best way up doing things. So I went there. C++ not too hard. I was getting it, but then I reached a little thing called pointers, memory pointers, and I got stuck. but never never ever ever anyone said this well again clueless um so i just uh i was using a little um messaging app uh back then and i didn't like the icons so i didn't like the icons i made some new

for that. Do you recall the app was? K-MAS. Interesting story about that. It's no longer a app that exists as far as I know. It was like a clone to use the the message, the Microsoft Messenger thing. Yeah, it was an open, a client for MSN Messenger. Wow, that takes you back. Oh, dude, that'd be in the last. Right. Interestingly, enough, well, another story there. So I decided to do those icons. I published those icons on Katie Look, a website from not one known guy that did all of the,

all of the own cloud, the next cloud thing. Random guy. So I put it there. A lot of people liked it. And yeah, today, I'm no longer. So I'm no longer so engineer since about 20 something years ago. And I started doing a lot of design stuff. First, I started with icons. I started doing a few icons for Open Office back then,

doing a version of what was Katie using back then, which was a theme called Crystal. And Open Office didn't have... Yes, it was Open Office then... ...go through my history of things like, yeah. Like, yeah, is it still open office by Sun. I think it was the Sun system. Anyway, I had to sign a weird document so that I could do things there. So I started making the icons for open office in the style of Crystal,

which was the style previous to oxygen in KD. So, and that got me a few people interested. Then I got invited to work on this new thing called Oxygen for KDE4, which was going to be revolutionary. It was. It was revolutionary. And then, yeah, things went there for a funny story. That Messenger app I mentioned was the same first app used by my colleague back then in Oxygen,

also really well-known designer, David Dignone. His first icons were also for that app. So the I guess I was replacing that I didn't like more from him, which currently I'm, I'm really, we became really good friends. But yeah, you know, small world, really, really strong. Yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. So blame C++. So around about when did you get involved with oxygen then? Well, uh, 20 years ago?

Something like that. That was when it started. And back then it was, so I was sponsored by Suze back then for, I guess, three months. And then there was a whole kafel in Suze back then. And most of those projects were abandoned. But I'm a stubborn idiot. And I decided to keep at it because it was fun. And I was learning a lot and had great people back then to help me learn.

And then we kept on doing things, even though there was no sponsorship. We just did it like, you know, everybody does things. And yeah, I too. So again, not having any idea of how complicated it could possibly be, I went and did it. and it's absurd. The amount of work that a theme like Oxygen implies is, it's certifiably insane. It's completely insane the amount of what that entails.

Plus, on that specific time period, this is the moment where the thing that we're probably going to talk about a lot starts to exist. which is back then we started to have the drift. We had cute styling. That's it. All of it in Q3.5 days was cute styling. There was nothing else. The plasma, there's no plasma before, but this is all new.

So all of that had to be created from scratch, concepts, all of that. I was there back then because I was doing more. more of that sort of work. The design like oxygen style, the cute style is completely my design. The plasma thing, I was deeply involved with that in the beginning. So all the concepts of plasma back then. So yeah, I was very much involved in that, also the Aachen stuff, which is the grunt of the work. To be honest, in terms of work,

work that people spend, designers spend in this sort of things, especially on oxygen. The icon design represented 70 to 80% of the work. Oh, Oxenet, it's inside. Why? Yeah, yeah, why is icons the major workload there? Okay, so Oxygen style. the icons were from a time period where alter realism was the thing. All of them are SVGs. So we were using SVG before SVG was cool.

And we were using SVG in a way, like to the full extent of what SPG can be done. I had icons back then that the rendering phase would take, Half an hour. Right. Yes. I didn't add a mass computer in the universe. Uh-huh. And the rendering system in Inkscape is not the most performant.

And I'm sure it was worse back then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was very complicated. Anyway, you were exploring. I'm still exploring SDD to the fullest degree. A lot of masking, a lot of, all of the things that you wouldn't expect a vector application to do.

I was doing it and we were doing it back then. And some icons are absurd amounts of work, really. They really take a lot of time. I just did an icon, again, in the same style for oxygen, which is the little camera, the video camera icon. And I did that one. it took me three days to do it. Right. Right. Okay. The new ones that we've been doing, the monochromatic one-line kind of thing, the symbolic icons,

in three days, I probably can pull off like 40, 50. So it doesn't even compare. It's like a completely different universe. Right. From a scalability, factor. I can't, we'll talk more about flat design and all this later, but from a scalability factor, I do understand why like that's the direction things have gone then. Yeah, probably. I don't know. No, we can't, I, well, we'll talk about that because that's, I, I, I have problems with that, like, that, doing the three-day icons was my thing. When, when, when all of the simplicity lands, like, I, I, I, I, I, I had, I, I, I, I, I, you know, I felt a little bit cheated out.

Anyway, so yeah, that was how I ended up doing oxygen. It was a massive project. It is a massive project. But I ended up and we ended up finding I was, I'm a little bit of an annoying person. So I go and annoy people. I just try and find people that do things. And I annoyed the hell out of them to make them do things.

So that's why Oxygen actually managed to be a cute style theme, a plasma theme, a sound theme, a cursive theme, a font theme. I'm missing a bunch of things for sure. Well, there's more things to Oxen than it's absurd. Yeah. Absurd is always the word I have for it. So what would the, I guess, Like, we can see what oxygen looked like, but what were the design principles that were guiding it at the time? Depends a little bit on the specific thing.

That's something that was peculiar about oxygen. So, the Aachen thing, for example, Aiken Thing is really a co-owned thing. It's mine and David's, the person I talked about. We were the co-designers of the thing. It's very much a child of its time, a child of Crystal, the Crystal Iconcestead from Everaldo, amazing, amazing designer. And it was kind of an inbreed of what was being done back then at MacOS, in Windows as well, and, yes, very much a child of Crystal itself.

But much more complete, was an extremely complete icon theme back then. It still is. And it was one of the first ones trying to adhere to the free desktop naming convention. So that made us to a ton of other icons that we wouldn't do otherwise, but because there was a free desktop convention, okay, we're going to do also these icons. So yeah, that's the icon stuff. The auction cute style, that is very simple. I was having a meeting right here with my colleagues.

And I thought, okay, we need to get, we need something a little bit more modern, a little bit more and a little bit more futuristic looking in terms of how we stretch Q'd style from what it was. So if you know what it was in Q3.5, we had plastic, which was a nice theme. it was also skeomorphic in a way, but it was very monochromatic. Right. Yeah. Yes. It could actually pull off its own way today. It's still, it's kind of the vibe of today.

But back then, more because they weren't pushing the limits of what cute styling could do. So I was here sitting here and I thought, okay, we should do something, hmm, something, I don't know. maybe slabs of stone. That's actually the idea of oxygen old. Oxygenold is slabs of stone. Everything's stonish-like. And I wanted to do something that was more realistic in terms of how we perceive reality.

So when you see a stone or anything on any surface, it won't be completely monochromatic. That's impossible. Light scatters as a point of direction. So you always add some sort of gradient on it and I went for this radial gradient all over. Not knowing, again, not knowing how complicated possibly this could be. It was actually quite complicated and a lot of people cried over my idiotic ideas. Nobody said no.

A lot of people said no, I just didn't take the no. Anyway, so that was the main idea for Oxygen kid style. And there was a lot of iterations over it, but it's still pretty much what you see today. And I think that that was probably the one I'm most proud of, because even today, it's still, it still kind of works. I still use it today. And it's still, so I managed to somehow, I think, get something that was slightly intemporal, that it's not, it wasn't so much a child of the day. back then that it wouldn't last. There's a lot of design things, design the languages that

are very today. And a few years after it just looks old. Oxygen Acute style, I think it was okayish. And it olded its ground quite well, luckily. And then we had the plasma stuff. So in Plasma stop, it was on purpose different because Kitty back then, was kind of getting, we had a massive problem, KEE, back then. What you see the desktop was just basically the background of the file manager, which is actually what Windows was doing. So the Windows also the background was the file manager. So KD.E not to be the same thing.

Anyway, so we decided, okay, this doesn't make sense. We're going to have to fix this. and smarter people than me, which is, okay, it's not hard to be smarter than me, but as far as people then me, decided, okay, we're going to do, we're going to do plasma. And when plasma is, it basically, it was in the beginning like a proper replacement for your desktop, your desktop background, where you're up your wallpaper, the task bar, and obviously we're going to introduce widgets, which was kind of a thing back then. It's still kind of useful these days. And all the things that plasma brought.

And we wanted to, because of that, because it was like a new thing and an exciting technology, we purposely didn't make it exactly the same as the cute style. It wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't look different. It wouldn't expose the themeability possibilities that plasma brings. Plasma in terms of themeability was a lot more freer than, cute style. Kut style comes, Kut style is old. It has a lot of baggage. It was created basically 30, 40 years ago. So it's very, it can, it allows you to do a lot of things,

but it doesn't allow you to a lot of other things, which plasma hoped and fixed it in many ways. So and plasma, well, it's SVE-based. We can do a lot of things. S-E-G is so cool. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, plasma, well, it's SVE-based. We can do a lot of things. SVG is so cool. And we did it something radically different. So I went for what is called oxygen theme on plasma, which was the black stuff that we're fixing it and putting it back again.

But it was out there. It was very flashy and stuff and black. And people. don't like black that much. So I got a lot of interesting. You see how design trends change over the years and people are victim of design trends. But if you and you being the first one right,

terrible experience. It's a terrible experience to be the guy that is right when everybody else is wrong. They are not wrong. There's no wrong and right in these things. But anyway, we were trying to push like the black stuff for contrast, didn't like it much. So we came up with air, a couple of distros, releases afterwards.

The fact, okay, maybe there was a little bit of, you know, Stokkel Street, Stalkham Sealed syndrome going on. Kiti4 was so great in the beginning. So the black stuff was the stuff that was very broken. So I think we introduced air in 4.2. I think, which is like when it started to work. Right, right, right. Being usable.

So, yeah, maybe that's also a reason why we changed. But maybe it changed. So basically there's two very different themes in oxygen in terms of as plasma goes. And it's the air theme, which is light and breezy and airy. And there's the oxygen team, which is the old one, slightly older. Like old, we're talking one year apart. Right, right, right. But it's more flashy and black and stuff.

There was a time that I tried to make everything black in Kiti. Till this day, people make fun of me about that. Yeah, so people don't like black a lot. I'm still trying to figure out if that's a global thing or if I can change it. I keep on trying to change it. introduce a brand new color theme for Oxen, the cute style, that is mostly dark. Maybe it will pick up this time 20 years after. Surely.

Surely this style will be different. Yeah. So how did you find yourself getting involved with the sort of revival of oxygen? Okay, that's interesting. Let me go a little bit backwards. Let's start with the end of oxygen. Okay, so when I was doing the four series, I said to everyone that were willing to listen and ignore me, that was going to do the four series and the four series of all.

I'm not going to do any more of this. This is insane. Yeah, I was, I was burned out a bit. It's an insane amount of work. So I said to everyone, like I'm doing four, and when five comes, you guys should find something else. So I have to do something else and I don't know. So I said, nobody believes in it, and then I stopped doing things. And the miracle of open source is that new people started to show up and they, and I start, a new group started to show up.

It was the visual design group. The VDP. And I was very much involved with that in the beginning, up to the point where I made them. I was trying to extract myself from that equation, not being myself around them and like impose my opinions. I do understand. I couldn't tell.

On everyone. So, and I was trying to keep away and I did something that I till this day I regret. I gave them a image, a wallpaper kind of thing that I made that I told them, okay, maybe you guys go for this sort of language design thing. That's the wallpaper for KD5.0. I made them promise that they wouldn't use that in any place. So the triangle stuff started with God damn me. I was so pissed that I completely got up the thing and I said nothing. Like I, no, I'm not.

I'm trying to find that specific wallpaper. It'll be it's somewhere. Yeah, it's probably, it's somewhere. It's definitely somewhere. So the first wallpaper for Kitty 5 was again mine. And I made them promising you guys are not going to use this at all. But it's yeah, yeah. So that became the thing and that proved like maybe nope, nope, bye, buy.

I was done. I was done and it was really done. I thought that when the new design to the QD5 and anyone that is around Kiti knows that when the new kit version comes, there will be a new Kiti version that comes as well with delay of one two years. two, one to two years, but it gives you enough time to think. So I knew that I was leaving, and this is when Metro design by Microsoft is pulling off, and the writing is on the wall. They were calling it modernism.

I never thought it was modernism. I think it's just postmodernism, taking inspiration in the past, blindly, and using, it as using it as reference but i was saying it was more than it and i don't think it ever was anyway i'm a little bit pissed with this with this stuff because now any junior designer can do what i do easily like don't let's not start with the a i okay let's not talk about a i because that gets me right that's a whole other a whole other question but when we're talking about you know So, especially if you're going like, fall in on the way that Microsoft was designing it, you're, you're arguing about the size of colored squares. That's the design.

That's the design question. And I'll be fair, I liked it. I like, it's the sort of design. Okay, I know that I was seeing it and saying, this is going to fail bad. Because I like it. I like that sort of design. That's design for designers. That's the sort of design that goes well on print.

And print media, it's bold, it's vigorous, it chops off fonts, it plays with things like that. I like that sort of thing. It's not my thing, right? It wasn't my skill set. My skill set is working three days on a racket. It was that skill set, which exposes a lot of your flaws as a designer. You need to be a really good design to pull off simple stuff.

Pulling off simple stuff is way harder than elaborate stuff. You can hide your flaws as a designer in a lot of work on top, a lot of layering on what you do. If things are really simple, your flaws are really visible. It's really easy to see that your flaws as a designer. So yeah, I was pissed because I would have to be a better designer in a way. But yeah, that was a good thing in some ways. I got lost again. We were talking about the end of oxygen and then we started talking about modernism and Metro design.

Yeah, right. Okay, so how do I restart this? Okay, so K-E5 goes by. There's a new QTin sound. I know something, okay, we're going to do something new, right? Right? Like, I'm expecting something new in Kiti land. And I thought, okay, maybe I can do something new. I was going through a period in my life that I was wondering things, what am I going to do, you know, 40 and stuff. So I think I'm going back to Kitty.

But I'm going to do all the things that I couldn't do and I didn't do back then without the constraints of being default. Oxygen is was a default theme. And being a default theme, it has a lot of constraints that optional themes don't have. Like I was always having to listen to annoying people saying that they don't like black. And I listened. What if I didn't? What if I did what my what I want to?

So I started playing around when if I had no limitations and I could do whatever I want to, what would I do? What if I do what I like and not what I think it's going to be popular or are going to be not even popular? It's going to be accepted by the most amount of people. So that's what I start thinking about, okay, oh two. I couldn't use O2. It is oxygen square, not O2. To make that clear, people always get confused and try to explain chemistry to me. I know chemistry.

It's a brand. We cannot use that. Yeah. So I started doing Oxen Square and trying to, I have a complete design language for that. That was, it's not dated. It was very much a product of a particular time. Like I got the neon pink and blue before the neon peak and blue became a thing. And now I can't look at it because it really became the thing. Like, Jesus, being right before time sometimes is good.

Sometimes it's horrible. Yeah, that thing become way too popular. So now I'm pondering what I should do in that regard. Anyway, over the years I've made way too many themes. So I can come up with them easily. The thing I can more about is the platform, the place where people, when I can be creative and where other people could potentially be created. Because auction was a lot of fun.

The period, the default time where I was like going to random guys that do fonts and saying, hey, why don't you do a font for a kiddie? We have like users, tens of them. And convincing people that they should do it, that they should do a font thing, a sound thing, a cute thing. It's a lot of fun. People were having fun. I was having fun back then. And people on Action Building funds.

So I think people should, there should be a platform like that where people can have this fun that I have and maybe join me in that process. because it's a lot of, it's way more fun to do it with other people and then doing your job by yourself. Right, right. How does it come exactly to the, coming to today? Yes, that's where we're going. Okay, how does it come? So I kept on maintaining old oxygen as far as I could be bothered to, mostly because

I'm a user. The old, yeah, so I'm still a user, so I keep on maintaining the things I can maintain. Usually sometimes I would push some icons because I was missing them on my screen. I couldn't bear the option. So I'm going to do this one because, yeah. And then Philip, yeah. And then Philip shows up, I'm going to fix these things, this oxygen stuff and air. Okay, I'm all in.

I'm willing to help. That's it. We, I already had the channel, so like the open for the oxygen thing. He joined in and we now have more people working. We have prepared. He's doing icons for, yeah, again, Icons, 80% of the work. But things are moving along nicely. And we're going to put Oxygen old in a usable state.

It was, it's interesting because it, even though it's, even though it was, so the, I declared it dead at the end of four. I told everybody it's dead. Come up with something new. Even so, they didn't quite listen to me. They kept on maintaining it roughly. It only got really broken with Wayland because it is a thing. Yeah.

It was a thing completely made for a world, that wasn't that. And the fact that it kind of works in Wayland is a testimony of how well it was, well, how well cute style is done to be there. The fact that it's C++ pathways and aka internally, it's mostly a vector described vectorly. It scales nicely.

So it didn't completely broke apart from a few things. The shadows were terrible. Yeah. There were bugs, let's say. say it like that, if you tried the fractional scale. But other than that, it kind of worked. There were just a few things. So we got most of those facts for the next release. And people get to use something that is, hey, not as old as I have. So you were already like kind of there before Philip showed up. Like you were already sort of maintaining it yourself, just not to the

point where anybody else is going to be using it. Yeah, only to the point where people were annoying enough or I was, okay, first, me, annoying myself, really high on the, on the, of the priority list. Other people filing bugs, it's mostly my shame. Like, I'm supposed to maintain this. Come on, like, fix this one. It would only take a year or six months for a buck to do things. It's just icons. The rest was, the rest was, uh, same. Semi working. Oh, there is one thing that is really broken. Kirigami QML stuff.

Right. Yeah. That is, it's really broken and the fix is not trivial because it's something that, well, it wasn't expected back then when oxygen was originally created, because it's in that space of when the cute guys decided to create something similar to plasma, but it wasn't plasma, but kind of is in that in between of things, of type of drawing things that is not cute styles. But it was also also wasn't plasma and I wasn't around to do. Well, and I said it was dead. So why would anyone do a kyrgygamy style for oxygen? So that one needs to be done. And it's not going to be easy at all. We'll see. I know a little bit of QML. I know more than a little bit

of QML. Yeah, not going to be easy. For a very quirky reason of how in KDE, I forgot one of the themes, K-WIN. Oh, yes. That's another one. Another thing that we need to do, K-Wing cleaning and if you know something about oxygen in oxygen you see no cave win that that's the whole concept it's a slab of stone there's no concept of a separation between the window decoration and the window itself it always felt to me a little bit of a abstract separation and i find it i i i could tell you stories about all my fights with the kiti people to to to to get rid of the tile, the colored top and to make the thing seamless. Again, being right before the time.

So that was a long and hard fight. And that's interesting. That's a reason why oxygen windows have the glow, the blue glow around them, the active one. That was my solution for people that wanted to have the title bar in a different We have plenty of solutions for that. All of them horrible as far as I was concerned. Default land, I have to appease the gods by my pundle flesh. But my final solution, our final solution in Oxeneland was the glow of active windows.

So they glow blue around them. That was the fix for the K-Win being able to be seamless, the same color as the window. Now, that will create a big problem. And you can see that on the new, if you use oxygen and you see a kyrigami app, that it gets broken. You have the decoration, you have like the little radial gradient. And then you have the karygamy stuff in its flat. Right. Because coordinating that gradient between two different apps is.

not trivial at all. Hmm. Okay. There's two different, very different objects drawing the same thing and it needs to be coordinated in a way that you don't notice it. And it's a freaking radio gradient and the center is somewhere in between them. Yeah, my developers love me. Right.

Now you see the big problem. How hard could it possibly be? Very hard. That's scratching off head. I saw that so many times. Yeah. I guess you would have to calculate where

along the gradient you're starting from and redraw it from that point. And remember, the K-WIN sizes vary and the window doesn't know. Right. And that changes right. Yeah.

Yeah, I've evolved. The developer really, really loved me. Just for a stupid radial gradient. Do you, have any idea how many times I heard? Do you really need this? I understand the problem now. I see the issue. Yeah.

I cannot give that up. That is core oxygen. That stupid gradient is the defining object of Oxen Q-style. So we're, so things that we're going to do in the future, we're going to try you with Union to see if we can pull it off. It's actually a very interesting exercise for Union to be able to pull up this thing that I just explained. We'll see. For anyone who's unaware of Union, I've talked about it in previous episodes before, but this basically my understanding is it's a thing. that is there to bring all of the disparate theming systems together.

But I'm sure you have a lot more to say on that. I have too many things to say on that. Yes, that's the idea. That's the idea. So when I was starting the oxygen two thing, I was going everywhere trying to find a, C++ developer willing to be as crazy as the other C++ developers that helped me with a gradient. Oh, my ideas for the future are way more insane than the gradient.

Way, way worse. Way worse than that. This is easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. So I'm trying to capture, okay, I have to find some idiot. Oh, sorry, smart person. Victim. Victim, willing to help me. So I go to Academy in Greece to do a training there about Qutuzanxi or something like that.

But also to cunning plan in the bag, like maybe find someone willing to help me out. So the current guys at Union was also, he was also thinking about that. And I was like pushing them, okay, you have to help me. So could we do something that enabled me to do this? And I'm showing my mock up for Oxygen 2 and stuff. And they got really excited. Okay, yeah, we could do that. We should do that.

We should do the new theming engine for KDI. And we should fix the mess that we have. It's a mess. It's a real mess. And it's not a default of KD. We have kid styles. We then created plasma, great idea. And then the Kip guys landed Kilmell and Ours.

And Kewmole is great. I love Kielmel. But come on. The third system. And they all have their way of doing things. They are all different. And doing a full theme is an absurd amount of work. Absurd. And you need to know a lot of different skills.

Theme in cute, cute styles. If you want to do it in a good way, you have to do the Z++. Right. You can do things with CSS. I have mixed feelings on that. But yeah, plasma theme, a lot of work. And you have to know SVG to be able to work them. Plasma, Plasma is a complex.

QML, border images all over the place. Very Pigsmap based, not great on the the vectors, like you can draw anything as long as it's a rectangle. Yeah, that's plasma free. So yeah, we get this problem. If you want to make something consistent, you need to work and you need to know all the tools. It's great that Union is going to try to tackle this and try to, with, as far as I know, a lot of CSS, try to make a, something where, within the same scope of language, I'm even not sure exactly how it's going to work.

It's going to be applied all over. So be it a QML app, a kid styles app, and plasma, which I'm still not sure again, they're going to pull that on off, but I'm willing to try it. Yeah, so all of that with the SSS, which probably a great idea. It's definitely a great idea to lower the barrier for idiot like me that are not as stubborn as I am. And they want results, right? Because the problem with being me and wanting the greatest thing and the craziest thing,

you'll need to learn all this stuff. You need to learn C++, you'll need to learn QML, you need to learn SCML, you need to learn SCG and plasma, quirky way of doing things. So if there's this one system that lowers the barrier a lot that is well documented, we will hopefully a lot more them going on on Kiti and that's a good thing. My understanding is

because it is a system that has to unionize everything, it is obviously going to have it's going to have to limit to an extent what can be done. Yep. That's my fear. Right.

That's that's and I'm pushing them in order to Okay, I'm going to come up with ideas and absurd ideas. And you guys see what you can pull off from this. What things I'm doing here, I'm designing here, that we can implement it for real. And in the middle of this, we'll find out like, I'm trying to push the boundaries. To be fair, the boundaries I want to push really are even beyond what QML does right now. What cute style?

Oh my God, what cute style? Cute style is the worst. It's great, but it's also the worst. I wanted to push the boundaries of what people are doing within our ecosystem in terms of theming, of visual user experiences of wow. Yeah, we can do a lot more and I think we should do a lot more. I'm planning on doing a video on this with better resolution so people don't. complain about the resolution of the videos. Who can that possibly be?

With better resolution, a lot of more zooming. Because you know what it goes? Like I did a couple, but I'm just showing the things that I do here. And I don't care. I think I'm just trying to show something I thought it was cool, but I'm not caring too much. And I think it's going to be obvious.

No, it's never obvious. I want to do maybe a video about something that is completely different, not even oxygen to something completely absurd. But that shows like the sort of thing that I would like to see people being able to do. People pushing for doing it. I think I'm going to publish a video about that and probably it's going to be long and it's going to be insane. The things I'm thinking is insane. I'm thinking shadows being propagating. and reflected on other widgets, reflections of widgets on widgets.

Yeah, yeah. None like cute style, not the tool at all. But hey, I get to paint the background. If I'm painting the background and notify the background that I'm painting something, I could. And if I paint another layer on top where things and I play with shaders, Hmm. Right.

I think, yeah, yeah. I know I can do this in QML. I will do this in QML because I've done similar things in QML. And it's going to be very wow in terms of visuals and why would anyone this live with such a thing. But yeah, I already have kind of a title for the video. Not why, just because. something like that. I'm very curious about this.

Yeah. So, but yeah, that's the sort of thing that I'm trying to push for and trying to see if we can come up and create in the future. See, point new directions and make a safe space for, that's always my goal in all of my doings in Kitty and open source. is to create spaces that are safe for designers in our world. Our world is, it's filled with, I don't know if you noticed, we have a few share of autistic people that will tell you straight on your face,

what they think about you and what you do, and will not set up about it. So sometimes we get this sort of people around, And there, and does that, like, if you're a designer like me, that is a civil engineer, and this is all just fun, and I don't take myself too seriously, that's fine. But if you are starting designer and you're not sure about your skill set, then you're still playing along. And, yeah, it's not great to have, like, the onslaught of, yeah, opinionated people saying that what you do is, are while you're destroying the reason why open source is the greatest thing in safe place. Right, right, right.

The only one to be abused here is me. So that's kind of the thing I always try to create safe spaces for other designers to grow because it's, um, designing in open source is one of the most enriching experience for a designer ever. You get exposed to problems that you need to work at Microsoft or Apple to be exposed to the problems. You need to work on those massive corporations to even smell the site, the sort of problems that designer faces in a project like Haiti, project like Gnome, a project like, yeah, all of the projects in open source have to deal with fundamental things

that are rare on the day-to-day life of, Let's make another website or make an app for something. I find that super boring and doesn't give you the range of knowledge that open source can give a designer. And then it's a pity that designers don't feel at home on open source projects. It's easy to feel like they are not understood a little bit. There's the very developer mentality, a very pseudo-rational way of dealing with reality versus the playful spirits that designers want. And yeah, that's always my main goal is to foster that and make designer in open source,

design in open source grow. And because I had great mentors when I was joining this. I had great people helping me and telling me, yeah, we're doing good. You're doing good. It was terrible. It was so bad. Oh, I delete everything I don't like. Everything, everything I don't like, delete it.

Never to be reminded of my own incompetence. Because of all this oxygen stuff that's going on now, I was looking at old stuff. Like I was going through the archives. Oh, man. That's depressing. That's so depressing. Seeing your incompetence splattered on your screen. Jesus Christ.

But I kept at it because other people told me I was okay. And I was doing a good job. Keep at it. So that's my goal. Beva, keep at it. I can help you. I know a few things. And you can do awesome.

And have fun. basically what are some of the examples of these these big problems you run into in open source all of the how do you make uh how do you make a system panel a configuration panel for millions of users that they don't complain too much but um hey make things for millions of users try to make something that caters to it to someone living in Nebraska and someone living in West Africa. Be mindful of a peat of color choices because that color is doesn't work well in that place of the world.

Right. Dealing with all left to right, right to left, text vertical. So all of these, this massive, when when you work in a project, that is global, you have global problems. You have to cater for so many little things that one as a designer doesn't usually cater because if I'm going to do a product for customer work, I usually go, I have a meeting with some suits.

I ask them a few questions, try to figure out what's the user base. And it's always kind of the same thing. The user base tends to be limited. and speed its product serves a purpose for a certain type of user. So, eh, small scope. This isn't small scope. This is everybody. Or like, okay, like, or Matthias Zetri's girlfriend.

We're still trying to do the desktop for Matthias Zetri's girlfriend. Why, I think? I don't know. So yeah, it's a much bigger scope in terms of the problems and things that you do. than normal apps. So basically you are put in front of so many users who come from so many different areas,

so many different backgrounds that you really have to think about what you're doing with your designs. But at the same time, that... And also thinking, like in terms of theming, because you're catering for, you're not catering for, for example, when I do an app for a customer, I'm thinking about that app. I'm just thinking about, okay, it needs to have a design,

and it's just for that app. When you do kitty-theming or gnome-theming or other thing, we're not thinking about a single app. We're thinking of a range of things. We're thinking, oh, I need a design language that works for a file manager, or a simple calculator that just has a three, a couple of buttons. or Acadian Live that has a gazillion buttons or CRETA that has a gazillion buttons. And it is a complete and absurd spectrum of things that you need to cater for

and that your design system must adhere to in order to solve all those issues. Which, to be fair, kind of was the greatest flaw in a lot. So at the end of oxygen, one of the thing that I believe was my personal flaw was not achieving the next step, which the visual design group attack of far better than we did, which is the next step. So you create a theme, but each app needs to have a couple of, needs a designer looking at it. See, okay, within the rules that we've defined, within the systems that we created, how do we make this, this, this, app here, use it correctly, and think the flows, the interaction flows, all of the stuff on a per app basis. And that requires a team much bigger than Oxygen was.

That requires a, I wouldn't say hundreds, but dozens of designers that know how to work together. That's a completely different kind of worms. working together and design by committee is they're not going to design by committee but having this sort of core team that knows the spirit of the language and then can spread it around right it's not design by committee you have the same vision it's just spreading the workload across different people yeah yeah yeah being able to to and avoiding the design by committee that's always the problem but you need to be a really good designer and uh really really good design with not a lot of ego at the same time.

Everybody wants to put their mark on things. That's normal. That's human nature. So in order for this to work, you need to be part of a group, not have a lot of legal, try to make the best, stop being a little bit of so much of a design and become a little bit more of an engineer in a way, where you just kind of blindly apply the method and then revise the method if you see that it's more of a, and I understand why it's, it's harder to convince people to do that because it's not as fun it's it's fun

dealing with the developer I like that I like dealing with the developer I like calling people stupid and that gives me a lot of opportunity to call that's stupid why are you doing like like this yeah got into a few problems like that but that's still fun but it's not as fun as you know just doing what you can all by yourself, all by yourself. Like a couple of guys doing global themes and not caring about the consequences of those things. One thing I often hear about KDE,

and I feel like this is another one of these things which goes back to KDE4. People will say, KD is buggy. We go back to KDE4. He will say, you know, Katie is, the design is inconsistent. We're back to KDE4. And as you're saying here,

like this is the complexity of dealing with this problem. Like, it's not inherently the fault of KD. It's just this is the work... Like, this is the amount of people that were working on the design at the time. It just was not feasible to really... Like, you know, you look at... I think when people look at, like, consistency on a Linux desktop today, whatever people think about the design language itself.

Like, Libid Waiter, really consistent design. That... Gnome has done a great job doing that specific goal. Yep. But if, especially with, you know, how complex oxygen was, right? As you're saying, this is just not, it was not feasible at the time. Yeah, no. And props to, to them.

Like, I have deep respect for a, I do. Deep, deep, deep, deep. I remember the talks back then when they were starting with the Nugnum thing, we add a conference, a joint conference in Berlin. And I have a chat with the guys there about, okay, are you guys going to really do this? Yes, they are really, they really did it. And it's great.

But it also requires something that I'm not willing to be, which is very much a design despot. and yeah, they have to be that. If you want really good consistency, you have to block not only the freedom of developers to do their thing. That's granted. You have to block them in order to do whatever they want to.

You also have to block the user from doing their thing. because users will mess things up. I was more on the approach that, okay, if the user wants to mess it up, that's the user problem. I guess. Hey, that's your, it's your desktop. It's the user desktop. It's not my desktop. I give you a version of it. If you like it, great. If you don't like it, as long as you're doing open source, that's it. You're really winning. And that's great.

I think even, it's great that in open source, we have visions like Nome and KDE and living together and then trying different things. I think it's great. I do fully agree that consistency in KDE, massive problem, massive problem. It's really, really hard.

And it's not easy to do within the way KDE does things. Within the way, Katie, you have seven theme engines. With seven theming engines, not going to be easy. But on the other end, sometimes it does amazing, amazing things. This, I do what I like to have the perfectly designed desktop. Perfect for who? It's going to be perfect for a couple of people that did it. You see what I'm saying?

This, this, if you, if you do this system that is very rigid and very, and very well designed, yes, you get something polished. But there you lose a bit of freedom out of it. You lose the freedom to, okay. Can you show in your image pink fluffy bunny themeing? It's almost like a joke in Kitty. There was a way we are pink fluffy bunny. I have nothing to do with it.

Nothing. That was zero. People did that without me knowing. Maybe because they know. But it's great. It's great that we had that. Mm-hmm. That level of insanity.

I think it was an April's fool's joke. Not sure. It was kind of an April Fool's joke that turned into a real thing. Hey, it turned out to be a real thing. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Isn't that insanity? A lot of other people are going to search for Pink Pluft Bunny.

It was. So this sort of thing is. great and I wouldn't lose it for anything even if okay we're going to lose a bit of consistency yes maybe it would be great okay it would be like give me 10 million 10 million give me 10 mills I hire a team of designers I'll have them in the pay in the payroll and will force consistent design from now on we'll put the team on all kitty apps doing the top down design review. Yes, that would be great. If we don't have that and we have to enforce very strict rules and how do we enforce them without making the code stiff? I actually,

I actually don't know how to fix it within maintaining the freedom. I don't, I don't have a perfect solution for that. I didn't ever. Hey, if you're a design and joint get he. Well, we can't do this. Well, I think the, that lack of consistency sort of does lead into the, the thing we talked about earlier, right, where Katie is this sort of place for design experimentation, right? Obviously, the default is going to have a certain level of consistency, but not expecting everything to be perfect, that does give freedom for those third-party themes to go and, you know, play around.

with things, to do things, which might be a little bit dumb, to, to, like, just try something because they like it on their system, not necessarily because it's going to be something which globally works. Yeah. I, yeah, exactly that. Yeah, you said it all. That, that, that's, uh, um, that's, uh, something I believe that we should maintain at all costs.

Like, do not break the freedom. Again, not. Not KDE's desktop. It's a, you know, it's KDAE desktop, it's Plasma desktop. But it's fundamentally, at least the way I saw it always, it's the user's desktop. We're just giving it to users. They are free and they should be free to do whatever wacky things they come up with.

Let's not like that's the ethos of KDE. We didn't, we have the most messy system panel on the planet. It is like that. I know we could layer it better. I know we can make it easier to use. I try that. They brought it back to the current state. The fact that they brought it back to the current state tells you a lot about KD. So in my time, I tried to get rid of the very thing in the side and the expanding stuff that they have now. And I tried to put it more like Windows and MacBurr. No. Windows were trying to do that back then, and Mac OS is also trying to do that back then

to put it like the grid of icons. We're basically open a parent setting, and then you have more settings inside that setting thing. So basically an icon is apparent of a certain type, and you navigate through that a little bit vertically. Versus this, this, all of a much more flatter version that we have currently on the side, that expands sideways.

Sure. But yeah, we don't hide options from the users. That's a great thing. Well, we could hide them a little bit. But not remove them. There's some things which were kind of hidden as we went into Plasma 6. Because there were options there, which were just, there is an incorrect option.

It's like, if there is an option which is just not going to work on your system, why is that even an option? You should just be like, that should be something that's automatically being selected in the background. Right, right. I absolutely agree.

But those are the third of things that, you know, scape the writer, like the guy that was doing it. Like sometimes people see KTE and see open sources, almost like if it was Microsoft or if it was Apple.

And demand things from us like we were. Hey, dude, we're not even being paid. relax but the guy it might be the guy doing that feature thing it didn't cross his mind he was doing it all by himself at three o'clock in the morning and it is solving his thing is scratching his itch it puts it there and now it works for him now only when people start complaining why do I see that i don't even have that, why is that on my face? He says, oh, all right, you're right.

Most of the time it's this little micro-interactions that need to occur. Like, the guy needs to be tell, well, maybe we should turn that off if this is not applicable. Yeah, it happens a lot. It is what it is. It is what it is. True. Yeah. So, do you have something here?

No, no, no. Okay. I was going to say, When you're working with other designers, you're working in a team. How do you avoid design by committee? By being an asshole. Okay. That's it.

Now, okay, so first level. Okay. First level, establish some sort of relationship with the designer. I need to trust the other designer. The other design needs to trust me. That's level one, zero of things. If this doesn't work, there's, okay, you do your thing somewhere else.

I'll do my thing somewhere else as well. Then great. If we pass this level of us trusting each other, then it becomes easy. Then we can debate, play with things, see, okay, what is your, what is your take on this? Okay, I would do it this way. And we keep on like it, right on this and this, this works. There needs to be some sort of boss. There needs to be, if you want to something that is semi-coherent,

there needs to be a guy, a maintainer, basically, like all projects. There needs to be a maintainer. Someone that says that is willing to pull a line and say, okay, no, we're not doing this because. You agree, you don't agree that that's your priority. If you really don't, there you go and you do your own thing and the oil project, but that is very similar to any other open source project. It's not fundamentally different from.

from anything else. Because design by committee is particularly complicated on design, but it's a thing all over. And it's more complicated in design only for one reason. Everybody is a stupid opinion on design. Like you don't need to know C++. You need to know C++ who have an opinion on most KDE apps, like internally about how things work.

And that puts the barrier. Like even the effort is massive. Like I have to look at this goddamn 10,000 line of code just to have an opinion on it. Just this work grants you a level of respect on the other side. Okay, oh, you went and you look at the code. Come on. Better listen to you. Undesigned things, people look at it and have an opinion and they'll tell you about it.

Yeah. So it's a little bit harder, but it's kind of the same problem. you understand that it's kind of simple, it comes kind of easy. It's not super hard. I have made a ton of design friends in open source, still happy. All the guys I was talking about, I'm friends with them. Even the dumb guys. So, yeah, you get to a point where you trust each other's method and you work together.

Maybe we should have done this the other way around. We're doing it like this. Who cares? What can be the result of design by committee? Why is it something you want to avoid? Oh, design committee. If anyone has been a part of that, anyone that has been part of a design by committee

as post-traumatic syndrome out of it. That's the only thing that comes out of design by committee. Design community is where anything good dies. I'm going all in that. It's when all of these opinions from people that shouldn't have an opinion are equally as valid as your opinion. And it's not that theirs is worse than yours. It's probably not. There's no wrong opinions on design.

Or not even going to design. Let's call it. I'm going to call it art. I don't like calling design art, but I'm going to call it now because this is. the field of subjective opinions, which design shouldn't even mess with. But there is this aspect. A design committee is filled of subjective incompatible opinions. And if you want to do a design by committee, it's going to be either the minimum common denominator and you get like an absurdly simplistic design or the maximum common denominator and you get. And you get an absolutely simplistic design.

Or the maximum common denominator. And you get. get Homer's car. And if you don't get a reference, you can show it on just Google, Omer's car, which is a clear reference of design by committee, and you get one of those. Great show to, great episode to watch. How do you spell that? Hey, Omer Simpsons. Oh, Homer Simpson. Sorry. Sorry, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. No, I just. Yeah, okay. No, no, no, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yes. Um, Okay, yes, I know. So usually the results, more common than not, that's a result.

Design by committee gives you that. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody wants to leave their mark. And it's not consistent. It's, well, it was a perfect car for a Simpson. He loved it. Only him. I feel like that was the first time this episode that the accents tripped me up on something.

We've been good so far. Sorry. No, no, it's all good. Um, yeah, no, I, I definitely see what you mean here. So basically you can either have the, the, the only things that everyone agrees on, or you have a bit of everything, and it just doesn't fit together.

Yep. Mm-hmm. Either way it's... Any fight, and any, and you have terrible fights about it. Right. Terrible fights. Right. Like because you have to, I used to do something.

So my, as customers, the worst, my worst type of customer is a customer that I know. They will have a meeting with multiple people about the design. Because if I know that they, they will, I can't deliver a good solution at the first one. Because people have a meeting and people have to say something. something and they will have to contribute to the meeting. And if they have to contribute and be meaningful and be worth their while, you know, they have to give you feedback, aka it is impossible for your solution, your initial solution, to be perfect.

Because it wasn't reviewed. So if you're a really a nasty person, I'm not. If you were a really nasty person, the ideal design for such a situation would be and design good, but with obvious flaws. Right. That you didn't design for that exact situation, right? Where they will point them out, show it to you. You get to tell them, great, change it and get it approved.

Uh-huh. I would never do that. Yeah, okay. In video games, we call this basically signposting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, everybody knows a version of this somewhere. Like, everybody does, yeah. Definitely wouldn't do that, no.

Absolutely not. So. It's a sort of design, to be fair. It was all part of the experience. If you've got to deal with annoying, if you have to deal with annoying clients, right, I can see why, I can understand. No, it's really to get to somewhere.

Like you, like you, okay, there is a little bit of autistic in me. Yeah, yeah, it's just a smit. So I want to get to from A to B as fast as possible. This is just trying to get from A to B as fast as possible because I know that this, and I will avoid the frustration of having to defend, which is terrible. If you put your heart, and on design, we tend to put our hearts into solutions.

We think them through, and we get to, attached to them, it's really hard to give that up. Like we get really attached to our micro decisions. And when they are questioned, you get defensive. I can be blamed for that a lot of times. So this sort of trickery where you already put something bad so that you can point them up so that you can, that you avoid, you already put yourself in the state of mind,

that you know that you're going to have to say to something that, yes, that was wrong. We need to fix it. Versus getting, again, exposed to your own incompetence. That's a harder flow in terms of interaction. Right, right. It's a sort of design again. I'm just designing a experience. I'm not designing experience because I want to do it.

So nowadays the look of KDE is the brief. style. I personally like Breeze. Breeze is, I think it's great. But what do you hope for the future of designing KDE? If you could just do something, what would, like, what would you want a future to be? Or are you happy with the direction things are going right now? I think personally, this is, I, well, they also do. They are going to change it a bit. I, I, yeah, I know there's, um, work going on the ocean stuff. Yeah. Ocean.

They are going to change it a bit. I think, I know. It's better than I think. I know. This, all people are fed up with, people aren't realized,

but they will realize soon, that people are a little bit fed up with, with a very monochromatic. I don't like calling it flat, but the flat style is kind of dead. And I know these things usually with two, three, four years in advance. It's just what designers do.

And you see that with neomorphism and the craziness in Apple. I don't like the last thing. I did implement it in QML just to see if I could. I did that crazy thing. It's all over the place. I'm not a fan. But you see this coming. And it's like a train.

exactly the same sort of train that I saw coming at me when modernism or pseudo-modernism was coming. I saw, okay, my language, the way I express myself is dated. I need to extract myself and change as a designer. Because these things are like trains. You can't stop them. And if you don't, and if you think you can, I think you don't understand design. So, Katie will need to do, I think the refresh, from what I see, an ocean will keep it up. We'll make it viable for a couple more years.

In terms of what looks today, I think it will keep it viable for a few more years. I'm not exactly sure. because I'm sure that neomorphism will will it's just a fad it's also I'm pretty sure it's going to fade away but as generations move that's it's a fact of life right people want to say they are different from their parents yes so they will try to find something different a new generation will try always to find something different just to prove that they are different different. They can stand and step on the creation of others and create their own new thing. And they see visual, that's why design is such a thing that changes with years. And we keep

on looking back. I can go to memorabilia, which Oxygen is kind of a thing. It's just memorabilia coming on. Anyway. people will need to change and you to express themselves and they use design items to express themselves and to define their own individuality as it is and because designers kind of work in like a big posse like a couple of guys come up with a new idea and then everybody copies it like crazy it a new thing will come up and it will become the norm and everybody will be doing that sort of thing and if you're not doing that sort of thing it doesn't matter that you're right you're wrong

uh-huh so but i don't know exactly what news coming if i did i would be doing it yeah there is definitely i i see what you mean with this definitely like some sort of some sort of shift that is happening like

obviously people have a lot of opinions on the Apple glass nonsense I can see that they like Apple wanted clearly they wanted to be like a design trend setter with this they wanted to do something so different that you know either people are going to follow it or they're going to stand out as unique what's going to happen next is really unclear but I definitely do see some more experimentation than we'd seen for a time because I do remember for quite a while, and even with Windows 11, right, Windows 11 had even

shifted somewhat from what was being done with 8 and 10, not as much as, like, Apple is shifted, but there's clearly, people are willing to step out of that, step out of that barrier again. Yeah. And to be fair, I kind of like what they did in the past versions of Windows. I thought that they brought a lot of consistency to the design language that they have. I know that me saying this is not popular at all people love to step on it. I think it's fine.

Apple, I do get it. Most people. So what's going on in Apple? Well, I think I get it. I don't know anyone now in Apple. But I think what's going on is they was trying to bring all the stuff that they had on the 3D space on the Google Glass or the on the on the 3D. I call it. Absurdily expensive thing that.

Vision Pro. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that they feel so bad at it. Well, the price wouldn't help. But they were trying to bring that into into the. into everywhere.

Because they use that a lot on the 3D, and on the 3D, it makes a lot of sense. Because you do want to show something in behind. It's kind of a brag thing, but if you see it on 3D, you see this glassy object, and you see what's behind it, which is reality, and you need to ground people on reality. That's like the 3D thing.

So it doesn't become super annoying and super nauseous. it brings that class. And then when you have that, they are, okay, then we need to bring that all over to everywhere. They went overboard. In my opinion, my very ignorant idea, it's cool as hell. It's a lot of, I tried the shaders, the shader stuff, it's really cool. Yeah.

Oh, it's absolutely technically impressive. No doubt about that. Yeah. That is all very good. Is it cool to use? I don't think so. I have a few colleagues using Mac and when they're showing the screen sharing their thing, like, oh, fuck, say. Sorry.

It's fine. You can swear. Yeah. For S, it's like, no, that's, yeah, not a fan. Not a fan. Yeah. We'll see. But the understanding that they are trendsetters and whatever they do gets absurdly

copy and then becomes the norm. And if you're not the norm, you are a old guy. And you're not hip anymore. That's a fact. We cannot fight against that. No matter what, everybody says, hey, oxygen is becoming popular again. I know why. It's what we do all the time. Years go by. And what was cool when you were a kid is cool again when you revisit it. It reminds you of other app here at your times. It is a fact of life. And yeah, that's a little bit what's going on in production. This is not a good way selling it.

But it is a fact. And because this is a fact, I know that there will be implications of this sort of thing on the design field, on the design space. I'm a little bit scared. I don't know what all of the AI influence is going to have on creation of design. Because now the accessibility, like, see, I got upset because anyone could do simple icons. Yeah, upset because, okay, now the, now you don't need your 10,000 hours on ink scape in order to do something fancy and shiny and realistic. realistic. No, you can, everybody can do it. This is going to bring that sort of effect

multiplied by a thousand because now everybody that as an opinion will go to the AI thing and spew out pseudo-inconsistent designs with more fingers than they need, less fingers than they should. Yeah. But in a certain style and yeah, I'm not sure what the impact of all of this will have to the landscape because landscape, the visual landscape will change. It might be that everything becomes a massive average and it became stale, because that's what it can do. It can do average. It does average really well. And things will become stale, but even then, I don't, not sure. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. The design space is one that I was just not really considered with AI. Like, I've seen

it it's just too inconsistent for me to see it really be used seriously and that, obviously for like one-off things, right? Like, this is a one-off commercial, this is a one-off poster, things

like that. It does a fine enough, not great, a fine enough job. But for something at the scale of oxygen where you want to have that large design, I don't even know if it would be able to approach a problem like that where we are today. I don't think, no, it, I hope it doesn't.

Yeah. But the land, I'm more thinking about the landscape, what people see every day when they look at design objects, that design creations. Well, and also what the tools that new designers have access. this is the thing that exists. This exists with the program in baseball, right? I have friends who work in, like, game development school and various other programming schools. And basically all of the students are using AI in their development workflow.

This is just the norm now. I don't know about design. I would assume, to some extent, that is there as well, maybe, I don't know. I can't really think about that. is starting to creep in a lot. And it saves you a ton of work, especially on the paid area, where are you up to, you know, make deliverables, the create design systems, which is extremely boring stuff.

And the AI tools will help you a lot with that. So it will write all of the gibberish thing that, yeah, all for you. And that is creeping in a lot. There is this weird space where AI sucks. Because it's, so it's really good at creating images based on the noise stuff. So the denoising creates a lot of images. Fine. Vector stuff, it's really hard for, for AI.

Because you have code that looks like nothing and you have visual result. There's no way to denoise the code. into a result. They, I, well, they haven't, if you ask one of the AI thing is to generate SVG, the results are bad, pathetic. Because it doesn't make sense, like it's code, but the goal is the visual.

So you have to keep these two things at the same time and the denoising is completely different. It's actually more like a dream. I have no idea what's not. I have some idea that the annoying works, but yeah, it does nothing to do with LLM's. So the AI can fix my SVG code, yes, because he knows how good SVG code is written. But with the goal of creating something visually nice, this is, this is why 0.0000007543 is better than 0.0.0.0.0.0. The code doesn't. So that side of design, I think it's okay for a few years, if it's not rectangles.

Rectangles with gradients? Oh, dude. Oh, yeah. Those, the gazillions of those. That's pretty much all of the AI generated bullshit. I'm sorry. Stuff. The design.

Even if we get to a point where it is generating SVGs that look good, I can only imagine just how nonsensical they would be to edit. Like what it puts together to get to that good-looking design. I have no idea. No, it's probably, it's going to be fine. It's probably going to be better. If it was actually good, if it looked actually good, if that's a problem for you, do not look at my SDGs.

They are a megabyte. megabytes of megabytes and I really had to have a hard time fixing things that I made 10 years ago. Okay, okay. Yeah, it's like, wow, this is complex. What the hell was I thinking? Yeah, sort of thing. Like a very, the other day we were in oxygen trying to fix a few problems with old old wallpaper that we have. on vector space, when you're doing like a big gradient.

You do a big gradient. 8-bit is, we always say, oh, we have so many colors in, with 32-bit colors. No, you don't. A gradient, usually, from max to minimum, has 256 stops. And this is like a deal black-to-white change. It's not that many.

a big white gradient, you start to see the banding, which is literally the stops. And you can actually see it, but please give me 10 bits, but we don't have 10 bits, aka how do I fix those problems when I want like a very smooth gradient, a very something really cool. You would do dithering, but you don't do dithering because you can't generate the higher. Like I would like Inkscape to generate my 10 bit per channel images so I could like run a dittering on it and get like nice dittery and fool my brain in a bit. I can't add that. So how did I fix that?

In the past, like I started adding noise and I started like doing jiggly, jiggly gradients. Like I would do stars so I could break the stupid bending and I could still see it. And I would then get very nervous and frustrated and start to play with blurring and more noise. And I keep layering and layering. See, incompetent desire? designer, does more and more and more and more and more and more and more and top to fix it. Maybe another paint of lipstick will fix the thing. I don't think that's how you say it.

Yeah, I think people worked it out. It is interesting to talk about dithering there. This sort of goes back to what we're saying before, right? Design trends loop back. Dithering was a very popular trend back in the 90s, back in the 80s, back in the 80s, where you had very limited color palettes. This was an incredibly common tactic in video games to, you know, simulate having... Yes, 16 colors.

Yeah, if you're 16 colors, how do you have the... Like, how, you dither. That's how. That's how you do it. Yeah. So it's cool. It's cool here you talk about that and like, as like a way to deal with a modern problem. And we saw all of the researches of the retro style. I know the customer for those games. It's the customer that can actually now pay for them and not pirate them like we used to when we were kids and we were having fun with them. And now we want to grab that fun again.

And so now we are actually paying customer much better than the old. Yeah. There things go, yeah, keep on researching. What have we not talked about here? I feel we've jumped around so much and I'm forgetting what we've even discussed. That's the only way I can talk. That's why I can't do proper presentations.

I do them, but I struggle so much like trying to keep this script. What is the script? I can only ramble. Actually, I guess we can go back to, we didn't really expand upon this properly. You were saying a while ago that flatness isn't like modernism,

You consider it to be post-modernism. If you want to expand upon that and what you mean, we can go there. So, yeah, okay. So when modernism came, the flatness, it was being sold as modernism. So if you look into modernism, like me with my civil engineer and the family that all those buildings and my sister is an architect and all that stuff, I know that story a little bit well. So modernism was basically when we broke like the architectural stuff. It was a very big thing in art. I love modernism.

I'm, oh, pro-modernism. It tried to break away with excessive decoration because it was fake. So when you see an old building, an old stone building with elaborate decoration, British church. Let's do with that. That'll work. Yeah. Yep, perfect.

Yeah. All of that stuff as intrinsic value. But at the end, at the start of modernism, all those things were being cast with molds. It was concrete. Made to look like stone. What was the intrinsic value of that? It is limited.

just decoration for decoration's sake. It didn't even show the value of the artist that carved the stone because now it's industrially made to look old. Right, right. And all the modernists look at that, this is, this is very, I'm going to break the castle and make something new and they went for something ultra simplistic. So we had new materials. We could have spans. We didn't need archways. We could have like massive spans that would open up the space. We could put the structure of the building on the outside and leave the inside for users. We could do all the things. And that's this kind of the story of modern.

And we could get away from the full, the fakeness. And the designer story when flatness came was very much the same. They sold it exactly like this. I don't think that was true. I don't think in a computer that applies. There's nothing real in a computer. Like, it doesn't make sense. And all of the metaphors we use on a computer,

they are real. Like, okay, we're not going to make a button like a button except the name. A button was always a button, a radio button. was a radio button because we were copying the radio buttons. All of the metaphors we use on computer are based on things that we add lying around. The switches look like things you could have on old radios. It all felt a little bit silly to me. And like people were trying to get rid of drop shadows.

They tried for a couple of weeks and realized, yeah, we do need volume. Or else people don't understand Z level. Press thing. Like we see, press a button. We say press a button. You're not pressing anything. But it's pixel on the screens. Yeah, but the metaphor is so ingrained in us that cannot escape it.

It is stupid to escape it. It will be changed for the sake of change. So I felt that it was very silly. And all that was going on was postmodernism. Postmodernism is what comes after modernism with a massive, the sentence I love the most is Robert Venturice, it's an architect really well known, got a Pritzker Prize, and the sentence is less is a bore. versus the sentence that defines modernism that less is more. I love that.

I hate what prosmenism. I hate the buildings from Robert Venturi. Sorry, if you're a post-modernistic person. I hate them. I don't like the style at all. But I love the sentence. I love that less is a bore. and I want to have fun.

But then I realized something, and this was like my conclusion to my period, not even modernism was modernistic. So like the king of modernism, which was Mies van der Ro, a very well-known architect. If you go and look, these buildings are really clean,

super modernistic, very straight angles, Genius. But his furniture is so neoclassic. It's all like chairs that look like Roman and Roman inspired. And they fit the minimalistic looks so great. But is that modernism? Isn't that an extremely decorative element for no good reason except that it looks super cool? And it does really look super cool. cool, I agree. And it's not his real name. His real name, the van der is an appropriation. He was a German guy. But the van der is a Dutch appropriation that makes it sound more posh. Aha.

It wasn't his real name. So even him decorated, he used things for decoration for decoration sake. It's own name. So I even the real modernism, which I love, I love Helvetica, which everybody will look at people, I really, really poorly at me just like, oh, dude likes Alveterica. Cereble. I love Elvatic. I love all of those modernistic stuff. And I think they take themselves a little bit too seriously.

And there's a grain of bullshit and it's, we just kind of like the look. I do like the look. I even like brutalism, which, Jesus, that's a little bit too much, maybe. But I like it. Yeah. Ah, yes, okay. You searched brutalism? Yes, I did.

Yeah. If you search Brazilian brutalism, that's a different type of brutalism. That's way nicer. They changed it from great. to white and boom. What the hell? Oscar Niemeyer and things like that. That's, it's amazing.

Well, anyway. Okay. Yeah, that's... Yeah. Also, brutally. Yeah, we don't expect... Yeah. Um...

How old I was great? It's kind of like a... Oh, right. The Sydney Opera is brutalistic as well. Mm-hmm. Mm. Okay. Okay.

Well, some of the examples I'm seeing here, I'm thinking like, there is like a certain type of like post-apocalyptic, sci-fi kind of world. That's not the Brazilian, but it's like the Eastern European virtualism, which is the most common. That's the one people get really sacked about. There is, if you would see the projects as they were in the,

when they were created, It wouldn't look that bad. They didn't age well. Let's call it like that. They didn't age well. They were all made in a certain area of the world. Like the ethos back then saw it like a very depressing area of the world. So there's cross-pollonization into sci-fi that used that a lot.

And you see that in sci-fi using that sort of scenarios. Right. for dystopian, very strong state kind of thing. And then you cross-associate that into brutalism. Is it fair? Those states did want to pose themselves as really strong and sturdy. And then they must produce things because they believe people were entitled to housing. Crazy things.

But yeah. If the buildings were made anything like the cars were made, I can understand why they didn't age well. Actually, they stand really well. The problem was they were made really well with a lot of concrete. Right. Lots and lots in concrete. Civil engineer.

It's good. It lasts. Yeah. It doesn't age well from a visual perspective. Sure. If you make it apparent on the outside, you don't even need to paint it ever. Which dussle doesn't help you in terms of look.

Like, it's a good thing that you paint the building. You have to paint it. And it looks, it kind of looks new every time you've painted. If it's bare concrete, you're not supposed to paint it. Bear it will just accumulate dirt on top of it. Which contributes to a very austere look. And it's gray in nature. And it brains.

Yeah. Yeah. Brutalism. Another. and we started on what? Who even knows? Who knows? It doesn't even matter at this point. We could just keep going, but I do need to sleep at some point.

Yes. So if anybody wants to go and check out whatever you're involved in now, where can they go find stuff? I really need to put the new website on. It's on, but it's horrible. But you go to the telegram channel where we keep on saying rambling things. That's a good place to start. You will be insulted, I promise.

Yeah, nothing else. That's pretty much it. Okay. I guess I'll do my outro and then we'll sign off. Okay. My main channel is Brodery Opposin. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream as well.

well, rarely, but I sometimes do. I've got the gaming channel that is Brodie on Games. Right now, I'll be playing. Actually, I don't know what you're playing right now because this has got a bit of a delay until it comes out. Maybe that'll get solid. I don't know. Check it out. Something will be there. And if you're watching the video version of this, you find the audio version basically every podcast platform at Tech Over T.

There is an RSS feed as well. Check it out if you like RSS feeds. The video is on YouTube at TechVotee. Also, we have Spotify video as well if you like Spotify video. How do you want to sign this off? What do you want to say? Goodbye. Simple, I like it.