Ever thought about upstreaming this?

[NunoPinheiroKDAB]

We have been without a maintainer of the style for many years ;)

[hazel-bunny]

Hi, Nuno. Greatly appreciate your work throughout KDE as a user of Oxygen, this repo and some of your wallpapers. I maintain a fork of this repo where I merge some upstream changes as well as some of my own changes. I'll just offer my take on upstreaming my changes.

I was among the first few people who tested this qqc2 style when it was announced on KDE Discuss. While it offers some tangible benefits over regular qqc2-desktop-style, it still has issues. Most of these issues stem from hardcoded design decisions in kirigami and qqc2-desktop-style. The only way to mitigate these issues is to fork and patch kirigami, as well as rewrite qqc2-oxygen-style in pure qml.

Michael has his own fork of kirigami, but it is not in sync with upstream. It misses many new commits from upstream kirigami. Therefore, users of this style are stuck between missing out on either the new kirigami improvements, or the improvements offered by this style.

Additionally, given KDE VDG has forsaken Oxygen for their own design goals (first breeze, then the breeze redesign, then ocean and finally union), upstream KDE could hypothetically be considered a hostile upstream to contribute back any changes made here. I have seen commits and merge requests in Oxygen by KDE contributors that entirely remove the whole window background gradient, one of the greatest differentiating features of Oxygen. There is already an option to disable the gradient in oxygen-settings6, what's the point of removing it completely? Many people have accessibility needs and take advantage of the skeuomorphic nature of Oxygen, why disenfranchise these people?

Lastly, the current direction taken by KDE, which gradually phases out most forms of theming for "security", is already stirring the community. Theming in Plasma 7 will be limited to Union, a lowkey unthemeable engine on top of breeze as it currently stands. We will forever miss the skeuomorphism, photorealism and gradients of Oxygen, textures of QtCurve and Kvantum, sharpness of MS Windows 9x and skulpture, consistency of Oomox and glassy blur of Darkly, Vinyl and Glass styles. Kirigami apps with built-in hardcoded controls will replace existing KDE apps. The folks at AeroThemePlasma have already fixated on forking KDE Plasma into Aero Shell in order to incorporate their changes. Similar forks will be necessary to retain the Oxygen look and feel.

Hence, as unfortunate as it may sound, I would not consider upstreaming my changes.

[NunoPinheiroKDAB]

Humm we should, talk. As an option I think we can make it real... They are free to do their thing. Same as we are to do ours... We have https://t.me/OxygenSquared on telegram A 16 de fevereiro de 2026 18:42:22 WET, Hazel Bunny ***@***.***> escreveu:

hazel-bunny left a comment (Plaristote/oxygen-style#3) Hi, Nuno. Greatly appreciate your work throughout KDE as a user of Oxygen, this repo and some of your wallpapers. I maintain [a fork of this repo](https://github.com/hazel-bunny/oxygen-style) where I merge some upstream changes as well as some of my own changes. I'll just offer my take on upstreaming my changes. I was among the first few people who tested this qqc2 style when it was [announced on KDE Discuss](https://discuss.kde.org/t/styling-kirigami-applications-wtih-custom-qtquickcontrols-style/39063/). While it offers some tangible benefits over regular qqc2-desktop-style, it still has issues. Most of these issues stem from hardcoded design decisions in kirigami and qqc2-desktop-style. The only way to mitigate these issues is to fork and patch kirigami, as well as rewrite qqc2-oxygen-style in pure qml. Michael has [his own fork of kirigami](https://invent.kde.org/plaristote/kirigami), but it is not in sync with upstream. It misses many new commits from upstream kirigami. Therefore, users of this style are stuck between missing out on either the new kirigami improvements, or the improvements offered by this style. Additionally, given KDE VDG has forsaken Oxygen for their own design goals (first breeze, then the breeze redesign, then ocean and finally union), upstream KDE could hypothetically be considered a hostile upstream to contribute back any changes made here. I have seen commits and merge requests in Oxygen by KDE contributors that entirely remove the whole window background gradient, one of the greatest differentiating features of Oxygen. There is already an option to disable the gradient in oxygen-settings6, what's the point of removing it completely? Many people have accessibility needs and take advantage of the skeuomorphic nature of Oxygen, why disenfranchise these people? Lastly, the current direction taken by KDE, which gradually phases out most forms of theming for "security", is already stirring the community. Theming in Plasma 7 will be limited to Union, a lowkey unthemeable engine on top of breeze as it currently stands. We will forever miss the skeuomorphism, photorealism and gradients of Oxygen, textures of QtCurve and Kvantum, sharpness of MS Windows 9x and skulpture, consistency of Oomox and glassy blur of Darkly, Vinyl and Glass styles. Kirigami apps with built-in hardcoded controls will replace existing KDE apps. The folks at AeroThemePlasma have already fixated on forking KDE Plasma into Aero Shell in order to incorporate their changes. Similar forks will be necessary to retain the Oxygen look and feel. Hence, as unfortunate as it may sound, I would not consider upstreaming my changes. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #3 (comment) You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Message ID: ***@***.***>

Sénior UI/UX Designer

[flipwise]

Hello, I would also like to join Nuno's invitation. It would be great to see both of you @hazel-bunny @Plaristote teaming up with us so we get changes done upstream.

Oxygen and everything in the repo is still officially supported and there's hardly anyone that's going to mind if we do a good job of fixing and maintaining it. I started the task of restoring Air and Oxygen desktop themes, and while there was some initial developer criticism, after assurances about maintenance it's going well now. Lots of positive feedback from users too these days:

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1r8d4c8/wow_thank_you_so_much_to_all_the_kde_developers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VplYzVNVncg

As I wrote in my blog post, I'm also aware that what happens with Plasma 7 has to be a conversation at some point. But if Oxygen is in a great state when that conversation is led, it becomes much, much harder to cast aside. You are both putting in a lot of work, work that could be made lighter for you without having to sync with upstream changes. And the work would reach a wider user-base. @hazel-bunny just as a small example, I saw that you added some color schemes - I was actually thinking of adding Air and Oxygen Dark color schemes. And @Plaristote I saw that you added a switch SVG - that's also on my tasklist. So do join us at least on https://t.me/OxygenSquared

[hazel-bunny]

Thank you for your invitation, Nuno and Filip. I will gradually upstream my changes, and maybe some of @Plaristote 's changes too. I'm not doing anything new, however. Most of my color schemes are from https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen/ColorSchemes. I saw an old reddit post about that, and got it from OP by DM. My work on the qqc2 style is also very limited to fixing build errors and adding new elements, those introduced in qqc2-desktop-style. Will join your telegram group when I find it appropriate.