We did listen to you, see above posts showing that you can do pretty much exactly what you want right now. I'm not sure what your point is.

Greetings!

scummos wrote:We did listen to you, see above posts showing that you can do pretty much exactly what you want right now. I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is that IMHO there is some need for have a conservative looking DE among non- IT professionals who do not have the focus on the constant upgrade of the software. Previously there was GNOME for them; and I just wanted to suggest KDE having such feature as well. A feature that does not require much customising from the end- users. This would require having only well- proven features and concepts.

Again IMHO - it would be wise to launch a full-blown survey to see this; not among the IT professionals and Linux users, but rather among common users who might consider using Linux and KDE.

If you like to talk only to people who would easily spend a day upgrading software to have a new DE, and who do not mind installing a new beta just for fun - you won't see them.

See me as alien, then.

I'm still not sure what your point is. What do you wish the outcome of this thread to be?

I understand the need you describe, but I do not understand why every desktop project should invest effort (upstream) into providing a way to fullfill it out-of-the-box. There's enough projects which provide a very traditional interface, such as LXDE or XFCE. So if you want something which gives you something similar to what you want without the need to change the configuration, I suggest looking into those. KDE, on the other hand, does not aim to replicate the 1995 user experience by default and wait for users to change it.

KDE offers ways to achieve something reasonably close to what you want right now. Since you want to use a flexible tool to achieve a very specific goal, it is not trivial to do so (but nowhere near as complex as you make it sound, just open the settings module and click around a bit -- it's not witchcraft to figure out how to change the icon theme, really). One possible improvement is the introduction of preset themes, which has been discussed in great lengths in other threads. What else is there to discuss in this thread?

Well there are some sollutions to the issue but they are essentially what we've already explained:
Making a megatheme. The idea behind the megathemes and a theme engine is to make it possible for users to control every aspect of the theme from panel placement, widget style and color schemes etc by switching megatheme.
If that gets fixed the megatheme can be used by you to create such a theme and release it like all other themes.

Also you must understand that KDE does not provide a fixed appearence to distros who use the Plasma Desktop Environment. Say that a distro decides to create a theme set by default looking exactly like you prefer it (and using current settings) and release it that would be brilliant and cool. But since the suggestion you have seems to be either
1) Make a theme (which Scummos did)
2) Force this theme on all Plasma users

I really don't see what we can do. I mean - the current default isn't enforced on anyone so, as been said, it can be easily edited and exported to be installed from the Systems Settings by just picking it AND if the Megatheme things pans out well it would be even easier to do.

It is not like you can't use, for instance skulpture style. It is very professional looking, traditional style for qt.

sir_herrbatka wrote:It is not like you can't use, for instance skulpture style. It is very professional looking, traditional style for qt.

Thank you very much for the hint - it is quite a good approximation of what I want, at least what regards window decorations. Elements inside the window are a bit too much CDE-like to my liking- but possibly I can live with it.

IMHO, there is still a need for very-quiet-looking icons (borrowed from some old GNOME, maybe) and very dull mouse pointer. My personal preference in Windows is magnified scheme; there is some approximation of such cursor in KDE - although the only basic arrow pointer(s) are really "dull enough", window resizing cursors are "comicky" and not similar to basic arrows. Sorry, just can not remember the name of that set right now.

Linux users are different. Some like "all the newest thingies". Some prefer "very conservative" look and feel. Some want it "like in previous version" - and they might eventually customize it and turn some the new features on.

Maybe there is some sense to provide such combos ("shiny new"/"like before"/"oldies-goldies") as the presets, so the user can test them without extensive navigation through the bunch of dialog boxes?
If my memory does not cheat me, there was something like it years and years ago (in Red Hat 6 ?).

Could anyone estimate how long (man-hours) it might take to create the theme+ icon set?
Maybe it would be a good idea to use crowd-funding tecnologies (Kickstarter?) to hire a professional designer to do the job?

Still not sure what you're looking for which doesn't exist already. There are hundreds of icon sets (see e.g. kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=22x27), many of them very simple. With Qt themes, choices are not as broad, but QtCurve can be turned into something very minimalistic by clicking the right checkboxes.

Greetings!

I am absolutely sure that all I need exists somewhere. But the problem is that it requires too much time and knowledge to find and fine-tune; and so
"having too much choices" turns out to be the eqivalent of "having no choice".

I do not want to spend too much of my time for fine-tuning; instead I am more than willing to give some donation to a professional who will do it for me
and for those who like the same design like me. The other choice is to continue using what I can get - even if I am not too much happy with it.

There are areas where the bazaar method works, and areas where it generally does not work. I think that visual design must belong to the latter ones (writing the documentation must be another such example).
So maybe it would be beneficial to hire someone who has a high reputation among designers to oversee the design? I won't give any names to prevent the flame war.

In my opinion KDE team (like any other one) might consider organizing some sort of voting "what you need" and organizing crowdfunding for the designs that people will find sufficiently useful for them. Sorry for my ignorance if it is already done.

BTW - AFAIK Ubuntu does accept donations, and allows to specify how they must be spent

I don't think much time or expertise is required to do this. My guess is that any reasonably knowledgeable person could come up with something acceptable in an hour or two. It's just about mixing and matching themes which already exist, which isn't that hard to do.

valexeenko wrote:I am absolutely sure that all I need exists somewhere. But the problem is that it requires too much time and knowledge to find and fine-tune; and so
"having too much choices" turns out to be the eqivalent of "having no choice".

Actually, you are referring to a different problem here: As you say, all the things you are looking for are already out there, but spread over all the different pieces of visual design (icon theme, widget theme, window decoration, color theme, Plasma theme), and even if you knew which theme in each category you prefer, it's still a lot of work to set it all up.
We are aware of that situation and we want to fix it. That's why you will find mentions of "megathemes" spread all over this forum. Actually, in a follow-up to an April Fools this year, Jens Reuterberg and me wrote blog posts about an idea which goes even further: "Experiences" wich not only set all visual things in one go, but also the layout of the desktop and panel to create one overall, consistent look and feel across Plasma.

And actually, given the response to our blog post, such a feature would be wanted by many more people than one specific set of designs.

Therefore crowdfunding for that feature might indeed work. and once the feature is in place, finding someone to collect the themes that would make up the experience you're looking for and putting it into a single set for users to easily switch to wouldn't be hard.

Would you like to help set up that crowdfunding effort?

colomar wrote: even if you knew which theme in each category you prefer, it's still a lot of work to set it all up.

This is exactly how I feel. And I think that FOSS should not to aim at the "acceptable" level of visual design; rather it would be much better to aim at the "top notch".

colomar wrote:Would you like to help set up that crowdfunding effort?

Unfortunately, I am unable do it myself - just too busy with my work and my FOSS project.
I would be very happy to donate some money and to give help setting things up; this help may include writing some texts. I think that I can not spare more than one hour a week for all that, ant that's in the very best case. I know if I will go a bit deeper into that - it will inevitably consume too much time. I am really sorry, but that's how it is.

Maybe it's better to find someone who has some prior experience in setting up crowdfunding efforts?
And someone who is good at designing polls - to figure out what's exactly needed?