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The Plasma theme is downright attractive. It's very pleasant to look at, and it does a proper but subtle job of drawing the user's eyes to the right places. Apple is known for their attractive theme and usability, but the Plasma theme out-Apple's Apple.

The window manager decorations are a whole other matter. They're not ugly so much as out of place. They're totally inconsistent with the rest of the user interface.

The KDE window manager needs to have decorations that look like they belong with the rest of KDE. (Without blending in so much that you can't tell where the window borders are, although there is no such problem with the plasmoids. Just make windows look kinda like plasmoids.)

There is already an svg-based theming engine called aurorae that can more or less do this.

TheBlackCat wrote:There is already an svg-based theming engine called aurorae that can more or less do this.

Cool. Then perhaps it should be default. Maybe that's my suggestion.

no it definitely should not.. aurorae is buggy and damn slow.. your would be better of using compiz and emerald

Ok. I'm not making any specific suggestions about how this should be done. I'm saying that the window manager theme is inconsistent with the rest of the look and feel, and my suggestion is that this should be fixed. As a long-term goal. Somehow.

It's obviously not critical, but I'm not interpreting this forum as a place to report show-stopper bugs. In the long-term, it would be good to update this part of the over-all appearance. In the short-term, there are more important bugs to fix. With limited manpower, something noncritical like the window manager appearance may be a long way off. But IMHO, it should be on the to-do list.

waldelf wrote:no it definitely should not.. aurorae is buggy and damn slow.. your would be better of using compiz and emerald

No need for that even if one doesn't like aurorae. Dekorator is also available, although it doesn't use SVG's. Still, both of them suffer from the same problem: finding a theme that matches whatever plasma theme the user prefers.

As for the slowness...it depends a lot on your hardware. It's next to unusable using Intel-graphics but it was fast enough on a nvidia-based machine (quite similar specs otherwise).

nvidia 8800GT.. the moment i activate aurorae "magic lamp" does its effect only every second time an with wobbly windows on the whole windowmovement lags an looks ****.. turn aurorae off and everything is back to normal..

are there any special settings in your xorg.conf?

(though i think if they are necessary for aurorae to function well, aurorae definitely needs an update )

waldelf wrote:
are there any special settings in your xorg.conf?

None that I can remember, although the computer with the nvidia-card, 7300 GS card,isn't available to me right now (not mine so it is at its owners place) so I can't check for sure. It's running a beta of the driver though. 190.32 if memory serves.

i upgraded to the 190.32 beta driver.. i think its a little bit better now but still lags sometimes occur.. i don't think that a little bit of transparency should cause lags in windowmovement... maybe its a problem with wobbly windows effect? (because all fullytransparent plasmoids have no problem but they don't "wobble")