Hello... I'm new to this forum, but I've tried many linux distributions and desktop environments as an end user. I was kind of hesitant about talking about desktop design as I'm not much of a UI designer. But here I am now to give a design opinion, since I do like KDE's direction.

Basically, the last time I used kde (Kubuntu), I noticed something that really bugged me. Basically the way I think it works, kde divides theming between the plasma workspace theme - like for the panels, widgets, desktop, etc. - and the window theme rendered by Kwin for applications. This I'm perfectly fine with. However, while left clicking a plasma widget gives you the nice looking workspace theme, when you right click them to see their menus, you see the window theme instead!

To me, this is incredably inconsistant towards a good desktop. I don't know whether this is actually changable, but I think that by default, the window theme of Kwin should never, ever touch nor render components that use the plasma workspace theme. They should be completely separate from each other. Think of how two completely alien themes - one for the workspace, another for the window - would look like in a beautiful contrasting design, only to be ruined basically just by right clicking a plasma widget.

I don't know if this was addressed yet in a new release or another thread, nor do I know if this is controversial. But I do think just this simple change for theme consistancy would really make KDE look and work considerably better, combined with all those other awesome icons and ideas I see in this design forum. But that's just me, anyway.

Thy will be helped... eventually

I just talked to a certain well-known window manager maintainer, and what he recalled was that currently, Plasma Next still uses QWidgets for the context menus, so if the widget theme is very different from the Plasma theme, you will still see the inconsistency. This has nothing to do with KWin, however, it depends on the theme used for the Qt Widgets.

The plan is to switch to QtQuick and Plasma Components (which would then use the Plasma theme) for Plasma's context menu in a later iteration, though.
Plus, the plan is to create a widget style which is consistent with the Plasma style, so if you use the default, there won't be much of an inconsistency.

In summary: Yes, the inconsistency will probably still be there in the initial release of Plasma Next, but it will disappear in a later iteration.

That's quite good to know. So basically, the inconsistancies were because of the type of software used to render the components, and not quite the design decision to make it that way?

Either way, if this issue is going to get resolved in the future, that will be very nice. Thank you for your reply!

clearflowerl wrote:So basically, the inconsistancies were because of the type of software used to render the components, and not quite the design decision to make it that way?

Yes, basically. You can harmonize them if you create a widget style what is similar to the Plasma theme (this is what the VDG is aiming for in Plasma Next), but if the widget style looks very different from the Plasma theme, then you have those inconsistencies. Plasma is aiming move most (or all) of its UIs to Plasma Components over time, so they will take the Plasma theme's look.