This Week in Plasma: Getting Plasma 6.3 in Great Shape - KDE Blogs

[Paul_Brown]

Oh no! Not at all. My apologies.

It is just not everybody seems aware of the fact that regaining control requires taking responsibility for that control and many still want others to do things for them. That is not how having control works.

[Paul_Brown]

@wojtek

Bouncing this off: collaborative, public project could also use input/suggestions from the users especially if they to absolutely love the software and want it to be used more and more. And having better default experience is one way of achieving that…

So, again, not annoyed, but let me point out firstly that input based on taste is useless. Nate said as much above. You cannot reason out taste because it is inherently subjective. It all boils down to “I like it better… Because I do.”

Secondly, much more useful than feedback is feedback with the solution under its arms, hence the call to get involved. If you have a criticism, you are much more likely to have your criticism heeded if you supply the means to solve the perceived problem. This is just common sense when dealing with unpaid volunteers.

This is a win-win way of approaching things: you get to be heard, KDE gains a new contributor. Without the solution, the relationship user ↔ community is unbalanced.

[wojtek]

@Paul_Brown

So, again, not annoyed, but let me point out firstly that input based on taste is useless. Nate said as much above. You cannot reason out taste because it is inherently subjective. It all boils down to “I like it better… Because I do.”

But that applies basically to everything UI/design related?

And to quote me:

@wojtek

I know that it’s a matter of taste but IMHO the default icon set is just… “uhm”

Besides, if I were that much off with my comment would there be an ongoing effort to… well… change it?

@ngraham

New icons are in progress; see New Plasma Icons: A Visual Design Update – KDE and Plasma Design.

And older post ( https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/breeze-icons-update/):

Another criticism of our current icons we would like to address is how thin they feel in high-DPI screens. To address this, we have been making our lines 2px (for the most part) where it makes sense.

Given this is an update, and who knows how long it will take for another time when an update is done, I also feel it’s necessary to update many of the shapes we have. We are using rounding for making shapes a little more approachable. Some icons have been transformed inspired by the original files. For other files, I usually check on other icon providers to see how different or similar we are to most icons today. That way, if there is a need for more editing, we can land on something recognizable.

@Paul_Brown

This is a win-win way of approaching things: you get to be heard, KDE gains a new contributor. Without the solution, the relationship user ↔ community is unbalanced.

Again, as someone working on FOSS project myself you are kinda preaching to the choir.

I’m not a designer or “artsy” person. I expressed the issue as best as I could (“make them softer”) and offered a comparison with something that IMHO looks somewhat “better”).

At any rate, EOT from my side. I’m glad that KDE is developing at an amazing speed and that I learned about design effort thanks to @ngraham links - I spend a fair bit of time digging into that space about which I wasn’t at all aware…

[ezh]

When the new icon set is expected to land? The video is 6 month old…

[wojtek]

There is a new blog post " Design System December Updates" ( https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2024/12/08/design-system-december-updates/ ) with publication date of 12/08/2024 and video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0YEpDcoEHc

(copy paste as I can’t include links…)

[itzikiap]

Wow what a brilliant widget!

[pallaswept]

Right? Luis has some great addons for KDE: luisbocanegra (Luis Bocanegra) · GitHub

[Drogoslaw]

Whatever y’all decide to do with Breeze, please, keep Oxygen around.

[Drogoslaw]

@ngraham

Ultimately this is why we have an icon theming system.

I’ll point out that looking for new icon themes (or really anything at KDE Look/KDE Store/Pling) is far from the best experience.

Clicking the “Get New” button in the Icons section of the settings application shows 17 (if counted them correctly) most downloaded icon themes, but even these few some have broken (squeezed) thumbnails. Hell, the first one, Papirus, does.

However, the web interface is even worse. The user experience which it provides is just terrible. I’ve mentioned it when the whole global theme accident happened recently.

[EliteAMDGamer]

Everything is looking great. Ive tested some of it on KDE OS. Keep up the great work.

I did have one question an will move it to a separate issue if needed.

@ngraham

Discover no longer shows the “Plasma Addons” category when not being used in Plasma.

I’m on nix os with kde 6 an have a arch setup with 6 as well i have never been able to get this to work (updating themes/icons) is there a pkg or dependency i need to make it work? Do I have to install the theme or icon pack via discover? it would make updating theme stuff so much more simple.

[Paul_Brown]

@wojtek

But that applies basically to everything UI/design related?

You’re absolutely right. Once usability and accessibility considerations are out of the way, what is left is a matter of taste.

[ngraham]

@EliteAMDGamer

I’m on nix os with kde 6 an have a arch setup with 6 as well i have never been able to get this to work (updating themes/icons) is there a pkg or dependency i need to make it work? Do I have to install the theme or icon pack via discover? it would make updating theme stuff so much more simple.

I don’t know now NixOS packages stuff, but perhaps you’re missing a package that provides Discover’s KNewStuff backend?

[Antonio_Pedicini]

Great work, is there any chance recent files gets fixed? Recent files not working - #12 by johnandmegh

[pallaswept]

It is fixed in 6.3

[Archie]

Most of the time, I rely on keyboard shortcuts than point-and-click but it’s also nice to have a bit of bling.

It isn’t fixed to the same color. It changes color like Christmas lights.

[Enzo_Nunez]

I think it’s also strange that the widgets have rounded borders but the windows of programs like dolphin or any other, doesn’t have rounded borders, makes it look inconsistent

[rokejulianlockhart]

@wojtek, I agree that rounded corners look a lot better in that example. However, that’s at quite a high resolution. On something like a 1080p display, there are benefits to the older design. There was reason for the current design once upon a time.

I presume I’m correct in estimating that the new icon theme shall take into consideration that the use case for the older icon design remains for the low-resolution hand-crafted bitmaps, whereas the higher-resolution SVGs shall be rounded.

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@Enzo_Nunez

I think it’s also strange that the widgets have rounded borders but the windows of programs like dolphin or any other, doesn’t have rounded borders, makes it look inconsistent

@Enzo_Nunez, I agree. I once suggested that the shell use the server-side window decorations, but was informed that because this would break plasma themes, and consequently couldn’t be accepted. Perhaps Union shall remediate this.

If you’re using kwin-x11, you can use noborderrrule=2 in your .kwinrules.

[wojtek]

@rokejulianlockhart

I agree that rounded corners look a lot better in that example. However, that’s at quite a high resolution. On something like a 1080p display, there are benefits to the older design. There was reason for the current design once upon a time.

Or maybe it was just a “design fad” (or lack of design)?

@rokejulianlockhart

I presume I’m correct in estimating that the new icon theme shall take into consideration that the use case for the older icon design remains for the low-resolution hand-crafted bitmaps, whereas the higher-resolution SVGs shall be rounded.

Not sure if there will be SVG icons dough. From the design blog/vlog it seems they are all about pixel bitmaps (with 2 distinct sizing). And yes, even though it’s tiny they managed to make it rounder .

I really recommend taking a look at https://anditosan.wordpress.com/ as it gives brilliant insight into what’s going on (and how KDE icons will look) in the future <3

[rokejulianlockhart]

@wojtek

Not sure if there will be SVG icons dough. From the design blog/vlog it seems they are all about pixel bitmaps (with 2 distinct sizing). And yes, even though it’s tiny they managed to make it rounder.

@wojtek, thanks. I was probably thinking of how they are in source:

@manueljlin

The current workflow for a designer is:

1. Importing SVGs from outside to the FontForge project (or creating from FontForge if you prefer);

…not considering that they appear ^[1] to be transpiled into DLL format for distribution:

dnf5 repoquery -l kf6-breeze-icons-6.13.0-2.fc42.x86_64
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
/usr/lib/.build-id
/usr/lib/.build-id/7b
/usr/lib/.build-id/7b/19f618ff61f7a3d714c34d7cbaa51cfbd4eb09
/usr/lib64/libKF6BreezeIcons.so.6
/usr/lib64/libKF6BreezeIcons.so.6.13.0
/usr/share/doc/kf6-breeze-icons
/usr/share/doc/kf6-breeze-icons/README.md
/usr/share/licenses/kf6-breeze-icons
/usr/share/licenses/kf6-breeze-icons/COPYING.LIB

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1. unix.stackexchange.com/revisions/791775/1 ↩︎