In the last entries I posted some screenshots of some upcoming features in the Plasma Workspace in 4.10, and they shown also a glimpse of another thing: a new default theme, on which I was working on since a while together with Nuno.

The new default theme landed today in git and it will be in the Plasma Workspace 4.10 release (disclaimer: the wallpaper is an old included one, the new default will be presented in a while ;)):

It’s the typical case of a radical redesign, in which everything changed, in order to seem that nothing has changed, just a general feeling of feeling more “right”.

The key design principle is to make the whole appearance “lighter”. Most graphical elements that didn’t have an actual “functional” meaning are now removed, as well as gradients (a pattern that says “3D”, usually reserved for indicating interactivity) on all elements that are not clickable.

Plasmoids looks completely flat now, the taskbar has now an element around only the active task, and the shadows of the items are different as well. On a related note, now all the popups will use KWin to draw their shadow, just like the panel. This means better layout and better integration with other windows.