The Oxygen Project is a project created to give a visual refresh to

KDE Plasma Workspaces KDE Plasma is a graphical shell developed by the KDE community for Unix-like operating systems. It serves as the interface layer between the user and the operating system, providing a graphical user interface (GUI) and workspace environment for ...

. It consists of a set of

computer icons In computing, an icon is a pictogram or ideogram displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate a computer system. It can serve as an electronic hyperlink or file shortcut to access the program or data. The user can activate ...

, a

window decoration In computing, a window is a graphical control element. It consists of a visual area containing some of the graphical user interface of the program it belongs to and is framed by a window decoration. It usually has a rectangular shape that can ov ...

for

KWin KWin is a window manager for the X Window System and a Wayland (display server protocol)#Wayland compositors, Wayland compositor. It is released as a part of KDE Plasma, for which it is the default window manager. KWin can also be used on its o ...

widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library (computing), library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of ...

themes for

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both Free software, free and ...

and Qt, two themes for Plasma Workspaces, and a

TrueType font TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating syst ...

family. The Oxygen theme set was used by default for Plasma Workspaces in most

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s, like

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

Kubuntu Kubuntu ( ) is an official flavor of the Ubuntu operating system that uses the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment instead of the GNOME desktop environment. As part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu uses the same underlying systems. Kubuntu shares th ...

, and

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable r ...

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 K Desktop Environment 3 (KDE 3) is the third series of releases of the K Desktop Environment (after that called ''KDE Software Compilation''). It was one of the two major desktop environments for GNU/Linux systems between 2002 and 2008. There ar ...

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”.

Oxygen Fonts

On the Oxygen Font sub-project was announced. The first release – version 0.1 – was done a month later. The 0.2 release from included refinements and added a

monospace font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with Typeface#Proportion, variable-width fonts, where t ...

Standardization

The Oxygen Project aims to offer standard icons, guidelines and a style guide. It builds on the

freedesktop.org freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operatin ...

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 The Tango Desktop Project was an Open-source software, open-source initiative to create a set of design guidelines and to provide a consistent user experience for applications on desktop environments. The project created a set of Icon (computi ...

People

* Nuno Pinheiro (''current coordinator'') *

David Vignoni David Vignoni (born 1980) is an Italian graphic designer specialising in icon and digital product design. Vignoni was born in Cesena, Italy. He is the creator of the Nuvola icon set, which has been used in many projects, including script.aculo. ...

(''founder'') *

Kenneth Wimer Kenneth is a given name of Gaelic language, Gaelic origin. The name is an Anglicised form of two entirely different Gaelic personal names: ''Cainnech'' and ''Cináed (disambiguation), Cináed''. The modern Scottish Gaelic, Gaelic form of ''Cainne ...

(''founder'')

References

{{KDE Computer icons Free software projects KDE KDE Platform

History

Oxygen Fonts

Standardization

People

See also

References