[Development] Replacing Cleanlooks and Plastique

[Alessandro Portale]

Not 100% sure what effective impact it will have for some end-users if
the styles move from qtbase to separate addons. Therefore, my comments
will be purly subjective. Please don't take them too serious :)
Imagine the voice of Karl Lagerfeld speaking out my comments.

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Bache-Wiig Jens
<Jens.Bache-Wiig at digia.com> wrote:
> The main focus of Qt on the desktop is to provide a native look and feel on
> all platforms. Until now, Qt has come bundled with a few extra styles that
> were not used intentionally anywhere. Historically plastique was designed to
> blend with KDE 3.0 and cleanlooks in early Gnome environments. They have
> long since been replaced by Oxygen and GTK+ styles on these platforms but
> have been left in our repository for historical and compatibility reasons.
> We certainly don't need multiple non-native looks and feels included in
> every build of Qt so I think we should clean it up a bit now that we have
> the opportunity.
>
> For those that want a reminder on what the old styles look like, you can see
> them here:
>
> Plastique : http://i.imgur.com/JLuwo.png

Feels like time traveling back to KDE 3 times. I found it chic in
~2006, but in 2008 I already had enough of the concept of simulated
"plastic". Too much distracting high-contrast 3D. Also, I never got
over the varying vertical alignment of texts, like in the screenshot
with PushButton, CheckBox and RadioButton (only CheckBox is correct).

> Cleanlooks: http://i.imgur.com/VrF05.png

Time travel back to -was it Ubuntu 8 ?-. Fine & fresh style
aesthetically and certainly an acceptable approach to make Qt
applications fit into some Gnome versions of that time with specific
themes. But thanks to the much smarter QGtkStyle, I do not see any
point in keeping CleanLooks in qtbase. Note: regression in slider
handle. Regression in the upper-left corner in the last item in the
TabBar.

> There are still a few use cases where including a non-native theme is
> useful. This can be on platforms that don't have a desktop environment or if
> an application wants to customise the colours of certain widgets. For that
> reason, I created a single new style dubbed "Fusion" that I propose could
> replace both of these two ageing themes. It was not designed to have a
> strong personality on its own, but rather be a simple and clean alternative
> to the styles it replaces.
>
> For a quick glance of what it looks like with a few different colour
> settings, you can have a look at the following screenshot:
> http://i.imgur.com/kn67x.png

Refreshing! Up-to-date, discreet, minimalistic (but not exaggerated).
Looks gorgeous in different color settings. I really think this is a
worthy replacement for the other two Qt-specific styles, for the next
3-4 Years.

> Code is available in https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,34458
>
> I expect it to have some more visual tweaks, but unless there are loud
> protests, I would like to have this change in before the next beta. The old
> styles will of course continue to be usable, but no longer bundled in qtbase
> itself.

+1

PS: Am I missing something, or why do the text underline lines
suddenly have that huge distance?

> Jens
>
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