Oxygen has been at the heart of KDE's look and feel since day one of KDE SC 4.0. It has been the umbrella project for all work on icons, sounds, applications appearance (widget style) and the window decoration. Both the widget style and window decoration have notably evolved a lot since their beginning, with their design having become more polished, professional and attractive. Furthermore, more features have been added, such as support for window grouping, smooth animations for practically every interaction between the user and an application, and the possibility to grab and move a window from any empty area. They both have also become more configurable yet maintain a simple interface to the user and a sensible set of default settings.

Since KDE 4.5, the style and decoration have become rather stable both design-wise and feature-wise, judging notably from the small number of bug reports related to these two components. Following a sense of completion so far, we decided to move one step further and develop an official KDE port of the oxygen style to the other widely used widget toolkit: GTK. It is named oxygen-gtk, is hosted in the brand new KDE git repository, and originated from one of the active developer of the original Qt version of the style (me!).

This project aims to provide KDE SC users with a large step towards a seamless integration with a large number of non-KDE applications into KDE, such as Gimp, Inkscape, and even Firefox.

The very first version of this new theme was released a few weeks ago and reactions so far have been very positive. We expect distributions to start packaging the code after the first bug-fixing cycle is complete.

There has been a lot of activity going on to fix bugs reported by users in this first release and, equally so, to add more features so that both versions of the style (QT/KDE and GTK) ultimately match perfectly. This has resulted in tons of changes pushed to the repository on a daily basis. Already, this project is likely the best matching GTK port of KDE's Oxygen widget style. Being developed (and hosted) by the KDE community has guaranteed high quality of code, long term support, and fast responses the requests of users. Oh, and it's a lot of fun to code too!