Trying out Plasma 5. Here's some ideas:
(Note: I am using breaze dark)

• The Kickoff Launcher is really hard to read. This is due to it being too transparent. There are two ways this could be fixed. One way is to have the option to customize transparency (or just reduce it). The other is to have where the main applications a different color (such as white) like KDE4.
  
• The breeze cursor looks nice, but it would be great if it came in white as well.
  
• On GTK apps, there is a long white bar underneath the window decoration. I assume this is because breeze has not been ported to GTK yet.
  
• When I use the breeze widget theme, menu item highlights are just a blue underline. In theory this looks good, but it makes it rather difficult to see what you are highlighting. There are two ways to fix this. One is to restore the default look. In other words, the entire menu item is highlighted. The other is to make that line more noticable by darkening the color and/or making it bigger.
  
• OSD displays (such as using the fuction keys to change volume) are white on white. I think we all see the problem here.
  
• In Krunner, there was an icon on the left that ran a mini task manager. Will that be coming back?
  
• Any incarnation of the Oxygen Icon Theme had no differention between filetypes such as MP3 and OGG. They were all given the same icon. Elementary and its derivitives, on the other hand have either text or color differences so you know each file type. I am hoping the breeze icon theme has this feature.

Other than these things, plasma 5 seems to coming along nicely.

Thanks for your feedback, but it would be much appreciated and much more useful for others if you embedded screenshots under every point, not everyone is using plasma 5 in production yet and trying to reproduce costs valuable time and will maybe never replicate 100% what you experience since there may be different configs etc.
One thing that makes me wonder is for example the fact that you use breeze dark and osd's are white on white.

Apart from that you say you use Plasma 5, which I suspect to be not true, I guess you use 5.1 since the Breeze widget style with the underline selection is not part of 5.0

Well the transparency thing I think I can answer fairly quickly:
It's when you don't have the effect "Blur" clicked in. See the blur effect in Plasma makes the background behind the panels blur in a specific way making it look less transparent and creating a nice effect between "Transparency" and "Opaque" - but the issue is that often its turned off making the very high transparency interact badly with the background.

A little background is in order here - the work was done by Marco Martin and he liked it and since he's a darling we rolled with it in the very beginning. The idea I think was to make it hardcoded but the later iterations doesn't have that which creates an issue when a user don't have "blur" clicked in and tbh raises the issue yet again for "Megathemes" where the theme sets the effects.

jensreuterberg wrote:Well the transparency thing I think I can answer fairly quickly:
It's when you don't have the effect "Blur" clicked in. See the blur effect in Plasma makes the background behind the panels blur in a specific way making it look less transparent and creating a nice effect between "Transparency" and "Opaque" - but the issue is that often its turned off making the very high transparency interact badly with the background.

A little background is in order here - the work was done by Marco Martin and he liked it and since he's a darling we rolled with it in the very beginning. The idea I think was to make it hardcoded but the later iterations doesn't have that which creates an issue when a user don't have "blur" clicked in and tbh raises the issue yet again for "Megathemes" where the theme sets the effects.

Another problem could be if the video chip or driver or whatever does not support the effect. We have to make sure that things remain usable without the effect.

colomar wrote:Another problem could be if the video chip or driver or whatever does not support the effect. We have to make sure that things remain usable without the effect.

I always thought that the background would fall back to full opacity when the blur effect is not available. This mechanism is either not in place or something is telling the system that the blur effect is available when it is not.

Good point. Will have to find Marco and ask him how it can be sorted

White on white.



The visibility of the menu text varies. Also, note the gap between the WIndow boarder and the menus on Firefox.


Also found this when using LibreOffice under KDE Plasma Next


Under KDE4, LibreOffice looked a lot better than this.

Hunter Nightblood wrote:White on white.

I guess that is because the sound components have not been properly ported yet (note, what you describe as "white on white" is the oxygen plasma theme style). That "white on white" should not be true for other osd's.

Hunter Nightblood wrote:Also found this when using LibreOffice under KDE Plasma Next


Under KDE4, LibreOffice looked a lot better than this.

Libreoffice always looked badly integrated imho and thats mostly their fault for using their own mix of toolkits. The style used in "KDE4" (please ged rid of that wrong term) has not been ported for it yet.

kdeuserk wrote:

Hunter Nightblood wrote:White on white.

I guess that is because the sound components have not been properly ported yet (note, what you describe as "white on white" is the oxygen plasma theme style). That "white on white" should not be true for other osd's.

Hunter Nightblood wrote:Also found this when using LibreOffice under KDE Plasma Next


Under KDE4, LibreOffice looked a lot better than this.

Libreoffice always looked badly integrated imho and thats mostly their fault for using their own mix of toolkits. The style used in "KDE4" (please ged rid of that wrong term) has not been ported for it yet.

What is the proper term then?

Hunter Nightblood wrote:White on white.

Ahy es, the icons shoud be black there.

The visibility of the menu text varies. Also, note the gap between the WIndow boarder and the menus on Firefox.

That's definitely not the correct blur. It's supposed to look more like heavily frosted glass.

Also found this when using LibreOffice under KDE Plasma Next


Under KDE4, LibreOffice looked a lot better than this.

That's probably a problem with Qt5

Here's another thing I found, edge scrolling (I'm using a laptop with a synaptic touchpad) is quite spastic. When I try to change the volume by scrolling on the KMix system tray icon, the volume goes all over the place.