KDE is bringing back its classic Oxygen and Air themes
Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they're patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6.
The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that's happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I'd like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are not just my work, but also, as you'll see, the work of the lead Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro, of several seasoned KDE developers, and of new contributors to Oxygen as well.
Filip Fila
The effort to bring these themes back go much beyond just making them nominally work; the developers and designers are also making sure the themes work properly with all the new features that have come to KDE since the 4.x and 5.x days, like adaptive and floating panels, various forms of blur, and a ton more - which includes making sure the themes are fully compatible with Wayland, which introduced a slew of new visual glitches and issues to these old themes in recent years.
They are also working on improving, updating, and expanding the Oxygen icon set, which should surely bring back a ton of memories. This work involves not just designing new icons for applications and other things that didn't exist back when Oxygen was current, but also fixing old icons that look blurry on modern setups, addressing cases where monochrome and colourful icons mismatch, and so on. They're clearly taking this very seriously.
It seems to be an organic effort more and more people got involved with as time passed, and they're aiming to have these themes ready for Plasma 6.7, to be released in June of this year. You can already try the current versions today, but they do require the absolute latest version of KDE Plasma to work properly. More improvements are planned for the coming weeks.
This whole thing brings a massive smile to my face, and is such a perfect illustration of why I love the KDE project and its approach and spirit. At this point in time, I personally can't imagine using any other desktop environment.