Oxygen Project

The Oxygen Project is a project created to give a visual refresh to KDE Plasma Workspaces.

Oxygen

KDE Plasma Desktop
Developer(s)	KDE
Initial release	January 11, 2008; 17 years ago (2008-01-11)
Repository	invent.kde.org/frameworks/oxygen-icons5
Written in	SVG, C++ (Qt)
Operating system	Linux, Mac OS X, Unix-like, Windows
Available in	Multilingual
License	LGPL
Website	techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen/

KDE mascot Konqi and KDE Oxygen Logo.

It consists of a set of computer icons, a window decoration for KWin, widget toolkit themes for GTK and Qt, two themes for Plasma Workspaces, and a TrueType font family.

The Oxygen theme set was used by default for Plasma Workspaces in most Linux distributions, like Fedora,^[1] Kubuntu,^[2] and openSUSE.^[3]

History

The original purpose was to create a new set of icons but expanded to include a new theme, which included a new cursor, widget and window theme, and sounds. It represents a break with the cartoonish look of previous K Desktop Environment 3 graphics and iconsets, adopting a more photo-realistic style. One of the overall goals of Oxygen was to provide a nice looking desktop that did not distract the user, so the icons and themes use a desaturated color palette. The name Oxygen came from a joke between the developers that they wanted to ”bring a breath of fresh air to the desktop”.

Version	Image	Description
4.0		Plasma theme is mostly black with white text.
4.1		KWin decoration features an emboss look.
4.2		Vertical gradients and use of transparency in Plasma theme when using composite effects, blue tint without compositing. KWin decoration looks more 3-dimensional.
4.3		A new bright Plasma theme, Air, becomes default.
4.4		Usability work, like animations for the widget theme.[4] New and reworked icons – mostly for toolbars.[5] Window decoration no longer embossed.
4.5		Monochrome icons for Air and Oxygen Plasma themes.
4.6–4.7		The icon set gets reworked file type icons.[6] Reworked folder icons.[7]

Oxygen Fonts

Oxygen

Category	Sans-serif
Designer(s)	Vernon Adams
Commissioned by	KDE
Date created	December 21, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-12-21)
Date released	version 0.2 / April 25, 2012; 13 years ago (2012-04-25)[8]
License	Open Font License

On December 21, 2011 (2011-12-21) the Oxygen Font sub-project was announced.^[9] The first release – version 0.1 – was done a month later.^[10] The 0.2 release from April 25, 2012 (2012-04-25) included refinements and added a monospace font.^[8]

Standardization

The Oxygen Project aims to offer standard icons, guidelines and a style guide. It builds on the freedesktop.org Standard Icon Naming Specification and Standard Icon Theme, allowing consistency across applications. There is an ongoing effort for supporting these specifications in different desktops, and by different icon sets and themes, such as the Tango Desktop Project.

People

• Nuno Pinheiro (current coordinator)
• David Vignoni (founder)
• Kenneth Wimer (founder)

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Tango Desktop Project – developers of a public domain icon set
• Breeze Project – breeze, breeze Debian package