14 DAY TRIAL // openSUSE developer Luca Beltrame has started a new discussion on the openSUSE mailing list, where he explains some facts regarding the future of custom themes for the KDE Plasma desktop environment used in the openSUSE Linux distribution.
According to Mr. Beltrame, after some long talks, the OpenSuSE team has arrived at the conclusion that they do not have the necessary skills, nor the time to modify the default KDE Plasma 5 theme to match the branding of the openSUSE project, which apparently caused a lot of issues when the desktop environment was migrated from Plasma 4.x to Plasma 5.
"Themes changed quite a bit in the Plasma 4.x -> 5 transition and that caused all sort of issues (some subtle, some glaring)," said Luca Beltrame. "Therefore we will drop the custom artwork for Plasma 5 and use what upstream provides, with the next update. That doesn't mean we'll lose all the branding, just the customized plasma theme, which is the source of most of the artwork bugs reported so far."
As a consequence, the openSUSE developers are now discussing the possibility of no longer shipping a custom KDE Plasma theme in the next update of the GNU/Linux operating system. However, this change will not affect the entire branding of the distribution. The openSUSE developers did the same with the GNOME edition of openSUSE Linux.