Why did the oxygen team (or whoever's responsible) decide that it would be visually pleasing to put white tray icons over a white panel? The default air theme is white, so white tray icons should be a no-no.

I must admit, the icons are nice. But only when sitting on a dark panel!

The panel is supposed to be transparent, with desktop effects enabled.

You may want to try Aya or tibanna, these plasma themes follow the applications color scheme and they are opaque.

With compositing enabled the panel is only semi-transparent (i.e. translucent), and there is still significant white to make the icons looked substantially washed out. With compositing disabled things are even better for then the panel is opaque grey. So the problem is with compositing enabled, not disabled.

I've simply switched to a darker theme (slim glow, e.g.) but as a DEFAULT choice, I think it's a poor one to use white icons with Air + compositing.

Maybe your background image isn't dark enough? :P

This is the thing with translucent things.. The best would be to have hue/saturation control for the plasma themes.

I agree. There should be an option to configure opacity, etc. for each plasma theme and ideally each element separately, like the panel, etc. But before that happens, if it ever does (I doubt it will), Air should use dark tray icons.

Another thing to add to my growing KDE wishlist.