I was looking forward to the 4.7 update and although I haven't had any serious problems, there are a few niggles I can't help but notice:

The KDE site lists some of the improvements in this version, including:

"KWin has a new shadow system, improving support for users of older hardware or hardware for which driver support for OpenGL is limited (Xrender backend)."

In fact, kwin shadows seem to have gone altogether. They are not listed in desktop effect settings and using any decoration other than oxygen leaves me with no shadows at all.


KDE has also improved the Oxygen GTK themes, making applications from GNOME (and other applications using GTK+) blend seamlessly with KDE applications in your Plasma Workspace.

I cannot see any changes at all in oxygen-gtk. However, the oxygen theme itself seems to have lost the radial style in the decoration.
The option to choose between radial and flat is still there but doesn't appear to make any difference.

http://kde.org/announcements/4.7/plasma.php

The page also highlights some changes to the oxygen icon theme, including a screenshot showing new folder icons, amongst others.
Yet my icons remain unchanged at all.

re: shadow

please see http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2 ... no-oxygen/

All users who do not use our default Oxygen widget style and window decoration might have had an unpleasant surprise after upgrading to 4.7. Our old shadow effect provided generic shadows for all windows no matter which widget style or decoration is used. In case the decoration provided its own shadow that one was preferred.
The new shadow system does not provide any generic shadow. The compositor is just providing a service to the widget style for rendering the shadow. This means that the widget style has to implement support for the new shadows.