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This is something that has been on my mind for some time, and I really wanted to bring it up to the KDE developers who manage the default look and feel. Please move the thread if it's by chance in the wrong area... I posted it in the KDE Brainstorm section since I considered it a debate on improving the default looks, in terms of quality as well as adding new features.

I think several people can agree that compared to Windows 7 and later, KDE's default looks are rather simplistic and unpolished. I believe this applies to both KDE 4 and its default Oxygen themes, as well as Framework 5 with its Breeze theme set. Now as a disclaimer, I'm not suggesting that KDE should imitate Windows and its appearance, but simply that it should consider good ideas existent in it and aim to be as good if not better.

To get down to basics, there are two things theme wise that I like in Windows +7 and hate the lack of in the default KDE: The first one is the panel and window decoration being transparent and using blur effects. The second is the panel and window decoration being possible to colorize from the color scheme settings. Both Oxygen and Breeze lack these abilities: There's no transparency with blur for the default KWin decorations and Plasma panel, while colors are hard coded and do not respect the color scheme. This can especially displease users who move to Linux + KDE from Windows (as I was) or KDE users that simply want a modern glass-like appearance. To fix this and get a clear customizable style like in Win, you need custom themes (such as Oxygen Transparent).

I have already created two KWin + Plasma theme sets that reflect precisely this ideology, and which basically aim to provide the features found in modern Windows themes while being of even greater quality. One is based on Oxygen and the other on Breeze, and they basically add transparency (titlebar / panel background / widget backgrounds, 128 out of 255) plus scheme color support (window background color setting) to them. If anyone is interested, you can get them here... note that the screenshots are a bit outdated and might be inaccurate:

http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=168769
http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=156954

http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=168737
http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=168760

I'm itching to ask the developers to consider defaulting KDE to one of them... but I imagine that's likely not feasible for several reasons, such as certain elements being harder to see with some color combinations. Still, I would appreciate it if someone in the team could try these themes out just to get their idea, then tell me their opinion: Why shouldn't KDE have something like this by default, and ditch the old looking opaque themes without customizable colors?

Now I know what some might say: "A lot of users like the existing appearance, and don't want things like a transparent title bar". Both of my suggestions however are things that can be customized and disabled, so I'm pretty much just suggesting features. Color scheme support in svg elements means people can set the color to anything they want from the settings, including the old style... in my opinion an essential ability! As for transparency, it's automatically disabled if you turn off the Blur desktop effect, which I personally tested and can confirm works for both Aurorae and the panel in Plasma (with my mentioned themes). Only downside is that you can't customize the transparency level manually, since it's a property of the svg elements.

Lastly, here are some screenshots of my desktop with the Freeze theme, which show in great detail what I think the default appearance of KDE should look and work like. Mind the pony wallpapers

http://i59.tinypic.com/23r6a9z.jpg
http://i59.tinypic.com/107762f.jpg

I am also surprised that the default theme for plasma 5 doesn't respect the color schemes. It seems like it would be better in the long run to make one theme which respects the color schemes and make whatever adjustments in the light and dark color schemes to make the whole thing look good in either color scheme. Then people can customize the color schemes to their hearts' content and the whole thing will respond appropriately (which may take more tweaking to make everything readable, but I'm okay with that).

As far as the translucency/blurring is concerned, I believe that was a deliberate decision by the VDG when they were designing those themes, likely because it does look nicer so long as backgrounds are chosen which don't obstruct the visibility of items in the panel (see the Visual Design Group subforum for details), The problem comes in that there are a lot of backgrounds which potentially obstruct things in a panel on the bottom edge of the screen unless blurring is enabled. It would be nice to have a setting somewhere to enable/disable blurring in the window decorations and panel, rather than rely on a setting in the theme to turn it on or off.

I agree that support for colorization is most important among the two. It's ironic that the Color Scheme menu has an "Active Titlebar" and "Inactive Titlebar" entry, yet they are not used by most of the default themes. The "Background" color should also be used by Plasma themes in my opinion... the panel and potentially widget backgrounds.

As for transparency, I believe it should be a setting, just like it was for Oxygen Transparent. It can be disabled or set to a high opacity by default (like 90%) and people can tweak it to their liking. Note that my themes are based on Aurorae, so transparency is part of the svg elements and can't be customized unfortunately... this is only doable via custom KWin theme engines.

If possible, I'd like to call the authors of the Breeze theme on this, and kindly ask them to at least consider colorization support for the Plasma panel and the KWin titlebar. I see no point in the hard-codded black / gray color of the window decoration... some people might want it to be red or blue or yellow or something else, it should be customizable IMHO. Please let me know what you think.

I know this is an old thread, but I thought it's worth updating if people find it on Google or anything: KDE Plasma 5.6 finally fixes the first concern! The titlebar will now follow the color scheme, and no longer be hard-coded to dark gray. Thank you developers!

The only remaining question is whether the KWin decoration could also get the ability to adjust transparency, for users who still prefer the Windows Vista / 7 / 8 style Aero blur. If any of the devs could consider that feature, there are probably other users except just me who might appreciate it

It would be great if you incorporated an option to choose the transparency porsentaya of the different elements in the color scheme.

ngiannip wrote:It would be great if you incorporated an option to choose the transparency porsentaya of the different elements in the color scheme.

+1