Hi everyone,

I'd like to talk about a weird issue I'm noticing regarding KDE appearance.
I'll start out - I like oxygen. It's a great default theme, and the designers did some very good stuff - 5 years ago.

But even though it's kinda-old, and feels a bit dated, all in all oxygen is a good, solid, and complete style.
The problem is that it's the only such style for KDE. There are many styles for KDE, but for all my hours of searching kde-look, I could not find a single style that was not Qtcurve - and qtcurve themes all share the same feel, and in my opinion it's not very polished (many padding/margin problems, many limitations in qtcurve - again, it's a very old style which may have been nice at the time).

I could not find a good-quality, original style for KDE. All are Qtcurve - with the occassional bespin, but they're even worse.

Back in KDE 3, we had many great styles (polyester, the KORE theme, and so on). Why is it that since KDE 4 there's no new good-quality themes? I find it very dissapointing that while in gnome you have amazing themes like Zukitwo, Mediterranean night ,etc etc - themes that are, quite frankly, amazing.

I realize of course this is all a matter of personal taste, and if people are happy with the current situation - that's great, but if other people feel like me, let's see how we can promote some more originality and new NATIVE themes.

What do you think?

I see you point, I just want to add this, which you maybe didn't know: Oxygen, QtCurve, and Bespin are actually theme *engines*, which means they're written in C++ and do a lot of complicated stuff™. QtCurve is very configurable through just configuration files, which means you can create your own variant with relative ease (i.e. without C++ programming skills). This is the reason why there's not many themes which are not QtCurve or Oxygen -- because then you'd have to write a theme engine which is a much more challenging task than creating a configuration file for QtCurve.

Another theme engine which exists is the Gtk+ theme engine, which is working just perfectly. It will draw widgets which look the same as the Gtk ones (respecting the current Gtk theme). Thus you can use any Gtk theme for all your Gtk and Qt apps, if you have one you like.

Cheers,
Sven

that is true. just look at skulpture soure code.

Creating qt theme engine is a not any easy task. I'm wonder how hard it is to make gtk theme engine.

scummos wrote:I see you point, I just want to add this, which you maybe didn't know: Oxygen, QtCurve, and Bespin are actually theme *engines*, which means they're written in C++ and do a lot of complicated stuff™. QtCurve is very configurable through just configuration files, which means you can create your own variant with relative ease (i.e. without C++ programming skills). This is the reason why there's not many themes which are not QtCurve or Oxygen -- because then you'd have to write a theme engine which is a much more challenging task than creating a configuration file for QtCurve.

Another theme engine which exists is the Gtk+ theme engine, which is working just perfectly. It will draw widgets which look the same as the Gtk ones (respecting the current Gtk theme). Thus you can use any Gtk theme for all your Gtk and Qt apps, if you have one you like.

1. I understand what you mean regarding the styles/engines, but you could say the same thing about GTK - you have theme engines such as clearlooks, aurora, murrine, etc etc, and then you have a plethora of themes for each engine. Unfortunately, two big differences: for one thing, it seems that for some reason gtk gets many more engines - it might simply be that they're easier to write (although I doubt that, from what I know about gtk). Furthermore - it seems that the engines allow far more diversity between themes, compare the "plain" clearlooks style to, for example, Shiki-color - they're both using the same engine, but they're very different themes.

As far as I know, gtk themes are written using a syntax somewhat similar to CSS - which obviously makes it very nice and easy to create them. Maybe we should invest in creating a new, modern QT engine which allows more configurability and is better suited to modern UIs? (not simply configuration options like qtcurve, but actually allow using css or something similar - that'd be cool!).

2. I hadn't thought about using the gtk-qt engine, it's an interesting idea. I tried it off the hat with the Zukitwo theme, and it didn't look that good (buttons too large for icons, textbox background overflowing the textbox and hiding the border, up/down arrows in various places misaligned, and so on). I wouldn't expect it to look 100%, as it's not meant as a general-purpose theme. Obviously it also drags all gtk dependancies with it, which isn't very nice.

qss? it is possible to skin qt apps this way: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://kde- ... CM9qyIbcNA

but proposal of using global qss setting for all kde apps was rejected long time ago.

I've held similar feelings for quite some time. I admire QtCurve's flexibility, however it can be a pain and no matter how far you try to bend it it is still QtCurve. I use Bespin and am generally satisfied with it - it isn't quite as flexible as QtCurve, but in general it looks and feels better than QtCurve; however it falls under that same category of it's still Bespin and there's only so far it can bend. There's also another theme engine called QuantumStyle which uses SVG-based styles, but It's still very incomplete.
There really should be more styles (engines) which provide a greater variety of look-and-feels (and it would be nice if there were more native Qt with gtk-compatibility themes available).

Perhaps with the move towards QML, there could be a new way of doing QML-based styles (engines)?
Or perhaps a new engine could be written which uses CSS to do the theming (or more manpower could be donated to Quantum and its SVG themes, which I believe that with some help and a few good themes Quantum could really take off)? There's definitely expertise out there with people doing CSS theming for other things (html and gtk in particular, I'm sure there are others) that a good CSS theme engine should lead to many new good-looking themes (and improved compatibility with existing CSS-based gtk themes backed by a native qt engine rather than a gtk-compatibility engine).

I can just add this to the thread: Theme engines are plugins, and everyone can create such an engine
KDE's official style is Oxygen, and I personally am happy with it. If you'd like to have something different -- go ahead and create it!

Of course we can spend a lot of time to discuss here what would be cool to have and so on, but that doesn't really help since ultimately someone has to sit down and write it. So, there's not really a point in doing an extended discussion on this topic without someone in mind who will do the work in the end. Which doesn't mean you may not have such a discussion, of course

By the way, the gtk-qt engine works perfectly for me, as in I can't tell the difference between Qt and GTK apps even if I try hard. I _think_ (I might be wrong) that it actually calls GTK to draw the widgets ultimately. It might break if applications do weird stuff, but for basic buttons and the like it works fine. If it doesn't for you, then something might be broken (but please do not ask me what).

Greetings,
Sven

I don't mind QT-Curve & Oxygen, I just wish it was easier to theme things like the taskbar & the Kicker menu. In KDE 3, it was easy to change the task bar, and you had KBFX to theme the KDE menu. Then Plasma Desktop came along, and now it seems like you have to be an .SVG wizard to make Plasma themes.

Why couldn't KDE use the Plasma Desktop to control the Desktop, and go back to the old way for the Task Bar & menus?

But then, I grew up in Xfce & LXDE land, where it's relatively easy to make/edit themes, so I might be a little Biased.