KDE: Set the Widgets free!

I just saw Erioll's blog. As a style/windec developer, I couldn't resist to the urge to answer but my comment was way too long. So here I come...

I agree with Erioll: Something should be done to fill the gap in between styles and windecs. They are two totally unrelated things and that's a problem since they both take part in the global look of your KDE. They should be one single thing one way or another. But, even if you write a theme that includes both, at the time of execution, the windec can't rely on the presence of the style --and vice-versa.

Along my daydreams, I already had thought about having a serene library shared by my style and my windec so that they don't both need to contain the same code to draw the same kind of gradients and buttons.

That was only a daydream. If the user wants to use only the style or only the windec, the principle of a shared library loses a lot of its interest. The only thing I kept from my daydreams is that life would be easier for me if the style and the windec were one.

Actually, the style and the windec never talk to eachother. They happen to share the same palette and that's all. That's something that has always puzzled me: One single window but one style plus one windec.

I had thought about writing a centralized config dialog for Serenity but that would have led me to include pretty much the whole windec underlying mechanism into the style to be able to apply changes to the windec. That's a bit silly. Besides, I have seen so many screenshots with my style and another windec that I dropped the idea. It wouldn't interest much people besides me.

If --and that's a big "if"-- KDE ever gets a centralized theme configuration as Erioll suggests, I don't think it would change much anything apart from adding another level of complexity because you can't make disappear the fact that some options apply only to the style and some only to the windec... and because some themes will just disregard everything but their own options.

I consider theming like a kind of art. So when I feel that round corners look better for my windec, I don't think that the big gun of any KDE's central configuration pointed to my head will make me draw them square. To comply doesn't belong to the artists' vocabulary. ;-)

Besides, I think that centralization has some bad side-effects. I was very interested in looking at every new theme for Beryl that Erioll cites as example. It was so... at the beginning --even if I can't use them. But now, they all look so much the same that I don't care any more. Centralization often means uniformization.

IMHO, trying to artificially bring together the windec and the style in a config dialog won't work. The only real solution would be that the style and the windec become one and stop ignoring eachother. That's the only way it would be natural to have only one config dialog. (I would even add the colorscheme handling into it in order to have just one big theme config dialog.) The inconsistency which worries so much Erioll would remain only in between themes but that's unavoidable. Either the themes are all the same with the same options or they are different... with different options.

Any way, I think that we would lose quite a few developers along the way. A style isn't as easy to write as a windec. And some users used to a very classical style with an eccentric windec --or no windec at all-- wouldn't see the point of such a gathering.

I can only foresee that the current status quo will last until an unforeseeable but necessary revolution. I have hope. Didn't the wall of Berlin fall? The wall in between Style and Windec will fall one day too and the widgetizens of the two countries will unite in a bigger country called Theme. ;-)