Introducing KDE Union and Plasma Next

Isn't this a bit of a hack on top of a hack? Surely it would be better (if a lot more work) to standardise the theming system across the various Plasma components?

If there's one thing I learnt about programming the quick and dirty method always eventually comes back to bite you down the line.

I appreciate the shout out for KDE donations; now signed up as a supporting member 🥳

Okay well if they redo plasma. They better keep the styles.

I always knew KDE is a mess but never thought it's this much bad.

How do devs even remember all of these?

Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
"14? Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases."
Situation: There are 15 competing standards.

Please make zoom effect in panels like Latte Dock used to have.

This is exciting as a KDE user. I’ve used KDE on my last two Linux installs and it’s great, especially compared to Gnome, but I’ve noticed that the design/styling of KDE has been stagnant over the years I tried it. Most of the themes are out of date and are broken in different ways.

Hopefully, Union would be a good tool to catapult KDE UI in newer designs and for the community themes to flourish more

But isn't all of that not just basically adding yet another complex lay on top of what already exists instead of solving the underlying issues of theming? Sounds like things with KDE are getting even more bloated.

Every time I open one of Nicco's videos I hear the "Okay so" in my head before the video even loads

Top quality, very informative and divulgative video. Thanks!

Didn't even realise it was that much of a fluster cluck under the hood. The main thing that annoys me in Linux/KDE is that GTK and other things not KDE do not abide by theme and DPI settings and I have to manually fix some stuff with environment variables that force it to be the correct size.

The other thing that is broken (randomly) is setting up a Plasma panel on the side of my screen which collapses to the contents, sometimes it launches and all the things in the panel overlap in the same space and the panel is not the correct size. The only thing I have in the panel is the "Icons Only Dashboard" and the "Application Dashboard", nothing else but all the pinned application icons overlap on top of the Application Dashboard icon. You have to open a new application that is not pinned to fix it or relaunch Plasma. It's been a problem since Plasma 6 was introduced I don't know why it's random either, sometimes it launches fine sometimes it doesn't about a 50/50 chance.

Something in Plasma crashes every time I turn my TV off and on, and that happens every time. Whatever it is relaunches anyway but the crash reporter launching multiple times is pretty annoying. Also I can't report the error through the crash reporter because the crash reporter crashes when backtracing because it uses all my RAM, spends about 4 minutes doing something then my desktop freezes, nice.

Aaaah, so that's why when using some of the 3rd party theming, the UI sometimes becomes unresponsive, it's because they use Kvantum. Thanks for explaining this, Nicco! I didn't know the world of theming was such a mess.

Plasma is incredibly powerful, you release more improvements in six months than other platforms do in years. So grateful for everything you do.

I really like the new icons buy i wonder if filled icons could be a possibility, or at least ones with bolder lines. It's something hard to me to parse the current slim kde icons at certain distances and pixel densities. Maybe an alternative icon set could be added as an accessibility option like high contrast themes are

This would be a big improvement if themes can be improved. There are far too many options that don't always work as expected and getting new themes from the theme "store" is hit or miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes I get an error. I also hate that I have to choose a theme with transparency to make the panel transparent. It should just work with any theme.

Wow this is so complex , I never thought its that complex like matryoshka..

Thank you so much for educating me :D

Thanks for your informative update! I don't write many comments, but one thing I have to mention - can you please fix the left of you two indirect lights. That would be great!

I know this doesn't completely have to do with theming but I also would like to see game controller navigation support in addition to an xbox 360 blade style dashboard effect for the taskbar/dock when switching between desktops. It would also be nice to navigate desktop shortcuts and widgets with a controller so each desktop page feels like a page on a console where you scroll through different UI options like favorites games, messages, music, downloads, etc. Of course I know you probably aren't involved with controller support for KDE but maybe another KDE will see this post and feel inspired since your channel is well viewed.

CSS support would be huge. Theming in plasma would literally go to the next level!

Any word on a screenshare (casting) app yet? Do I still have to dl gnome just to use one app?

I first thought the main advantage would have been to avoid security issues from malicious compiled themes, but this is indeed a big mess.

The video format is sooo KDE , awesome 👍 and the kirigami styled lamps were just cherry on top 👌

what some people in these comments is that this isn't a new theming standard, but a tool to generate themes for different toolkits

1st Thank you so very much for sharing your brilliant & widely artistic talent.
It wasn't long ago I made the comment to a friend "This SVG implementation can't possibly be most efficient" Appropriately Why? They are far too easy to create... Nothing this easy can be efficient.

I wish KDE devs added the possibility to open KLauncher with Super key and gave it a little more love in the design of it to be a little bit more minimal and added some features to it like showing time/date (like flow launcher), etc.

I'm a UX/UI designer myself and what KDE is doing with their design system is monumental. It may take years to finally get it somewhere, but it's a great start!

I just updated to Plasma 6.3 and couldn't login. It knew my user name and popped up a virtual keyboard, but my laptop HAS a real keyboard. I entered my password and hit enter. Nothing happened. So I re-installed from an iso marked 2-2-2025.

Great Video! Really exited for these changes!

Whatever helps with the mess of KDE is welcome. I do hope it gets properly documented.

❤️ kde but you guys need something like libadwaita

this complexity is why GNOME completely gave up on theming and I can't really blame them.

Thanks for the video! I read about the work but this overview is super helpful.

Cleaning up the styling is a great move, by the way.

I just want to say that the gtk breeze is amazing

not again

I just upgraded to Plasma 6.3.0 on my Fedora 41. Now my KDE is amazing! Earlier I had to use X11 to get clear fonts since I use factional scaling, now I switched to Wayland and everything is so smooth and sharp and so cool 🙂

xkcd 927

This sounds like great news. Just guessing from what you talk about: implementing output for other desktops and their theme engines should be possible, too, shouldn't it? Of course there would be different widgets, different UI element trees, but the idea of having an abstraction layer on top of this could even make porting themes from one desktop to another feasible to some point? Some years ago I had done some work on Enlightenment themes, but I eventually gave up because this really felt like writing assembler code for graphical elements as there was simply no abstraction at all...

So will my arch ljnux with windows 7 theme broke after the update .:(

Compiling or transpiling stuff like this almost always ends up in quite messy bugs and lack of control in minute details and optimizations but I definitely see the benefits for the development effort.

Hey Nico,
the first two minutes explain a lot of problems I had with kde plasma.

I am kind of a long time kubuntu fan. It was my first step away from windows and its been 4 years windows free :).

But man everytime I indoctrinated someone into using kubuntu I told them to never change these style settings beyon dark/light 😂😂

Dang, and I finally thought the other day, that after 40 years, Linux on Desktop had finally arrived, and I could finally almost entirely jump ship from Windows.
But only because I've parred my Windows apps down to the bare minimum, which also exist on Linux (Audacity, VLC, Firefox, OBS Studio, Discord, Steam, etc)
The only think I'm missing is my big killer creative applications like Sony Vegas... KDenlive will never be there for that, but it's a good beachhead start.

Worth noting, it's not Linux that is facilitating me jumping to Linux, but ports of open source projects to Windows that help me jump ship. When I use apps on Windows that also are absolutely identical under Linux, then it because possible. I've been trying to migrate to Linux since 1991 when I first installed Slackware on a homebuilt 386 system from floppy disks. I've tried just about every distro under the sun.

I hope KDE Neon is a serious distro they plan to support a long while, and not just a technology demonstration platform for KDE, and they ditch it as soon as Plasma gains ground in more robust other distros. That would svx for me, because Neon looks to be even more polished now than anything else out there.

It's a huge mess. Too many finely grained settings that are surfaced for the user by default, rather than perhaps a toggle for exposing deeper "features or option" for "Advanced Users" or something.

KDE 6.x is buggy rubbish, especially on Wayland. Unless you're a developer, when you install KDE 6.x, you're screwed when it comes to getting rid of KDE 6.x bugs.

KDE Desktop still sucks, it's gotten better over the years, but still feels disconnected, like every part of the UI is made by a completely different team. I want to like it, but the endless "flexibility" is actually its downfall. Look at Apple, and it turns out great design isn't about having a billion options, its about having a limited set of exceptionally refined "out of the box" fixed design options. Until that changes, KDE will remain a broken dump of half baked ideas.

shouldn't this been considered and developed a long time ago/since the beggining given the fact that there are multiple and certain ways to customize KDE?

KDE's default theme needs a revamped style guide with better consistency and less clutter.

ideally in the future, the whole theme system would just be css. i dont particularly like css, but its very widely understood and opens the door for so many people to write their own themes in a single file

The KDE environment seems to be so messy that it makes me dizzy. I hope one day they can improve that mess and be stricter with the standards (wink to GNOME).

Plasma is a mess, as usual, even though I love to use it, we can't say that it is an organized project. The more years pass, the more fragmented it gets. We should have a few months of focus on only organizing and simplifying the project, this Union theme is yet another hacky way to try and make multiple fragments work together, but never solving the fact that there are too many fragments. Why not choose a SINGLE toolkit and slowly port all plasma apps and components to it? As much as I hate gnome, stuff like libadwaita and GTK is extremely well organized and optimized ... We need this on KDE.