On Monday 20 June 2011 02:10:22 andi robert wrote:
That is good input Jos. I mostly think it a good idea moving away from oxygen because of the lack of customization that you can do on it. QtCurve has a very detailed interface that lets you change just about whatever you want. Something that is not available currently on Oxygen. If you look into kde-look.org you will see that there are plenty more qtcurve configurations for download than Oxygen tweaks. This gives me the impression, that at some level, KDE users want to be able to customize their window styling. But obviously, such is a very personal preference. People from the community can vote and see whether they would like to change this.
Design by committee - I'm not so sure. I know Oxygen isn't super customizable but why does it have to be? It has the most important options (and have you ever seen oxygen-settings?) and simply looks good by default. If people want QtCurve, they can use it. I'd be all for removing some of the bad default styles from KDE and adding QtCurve instead, with a few nice default configurations shipped by us. It is easy to make that happen - fork the QtCurve package on OBS, add the configurations, submit it back to Factory. But I wouldn't replace Oxygen by default, it's a really good and modern style. I actually know a few professional designers (of course Mac users) which tell me it's the first linux style they like. And quite it's unique, compared to Mac or Windows or Android.
On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Jos Poortvliet <jos@opensuse.org> wrote:
On Sunday 19 June 2011 23:03:40 andi robert wrote:
I was thinking we could add custom icons, window styles (qtcurve for max compatibility with gtk apps) a new color scheme, and custom widgets for the KDE desktop.
This is what I have currently
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/snapshot68.png/
Although, that image has more.
I wouldn't deviate too much from the standard KDE look. Especially Oxygen is very good, well maintained and with oxygen-gtk integrates GTK apps perfectly (lots of improvements coming with 4.7). With Oxygen you benefit from the hard work of some incredibly good artists - they for example optimized the colors to not look crappy on many old-and-bad monitors. That was difficult work and something I'd rather not have to re-do. And think about graphics performance, usability, stuff like that. GNOME 3, meanwhile, also focusses heavily on a 'standard' look. And the same there goes for colors etc.
We can and should of course have our own wallpaper, GRUB, boot-, login- and app splashes. Moreover, we could do as we did before with the Plasma theme - have a subtle variation, replacing the circles with something more opensuse-y.
I like this too. The more clever branding, the better. I was thinking also that it could be pretty good to try different default widgets, not just the folder one. But something like Weather, RSS or something of the sort. Even a small plasma tutorial to start using openSUSE.
Agreed, the default panel and applet setup is something we could change. Why not do a proposal? A plasma tutorial thing would be awesome but has to be written by someone :D Maybe you can propose a hack session for the openSUSE conference to write such a plasmoid. With QML it is easy, we can get Sebas or others to help us with it, teach it or do it after the Plasma/QML workshop Sebas will surely give and ask people there to join the hack session and help us out with their new skills! If we can have a good proposal beforehand we could write it at oSC. Such a proposal would be nice to make & blog about to get feedback...