There is something really weird going on right now. On one side, hardware manufacturers sell their wares with ever brighter screens and higher color gradients and accuracy - on the other, interfaces have become dark, low contrast, monochrome, and stylized.

When I look at my KDE bar, there are only two icons with any color or line thickness at all. The other ones are all dark gray on light gray and line-based. I have to look three times to decide whether something is the WiFi indicator or the volume control; the clipboard and the wallet icons look too similar to tell which is which.

I don't want the garish world of manufacturer ads, showing off how much brightness and color their devices are capable, but please don't give me the exact opposite, and indistinguishable mess where everything looks the same even though you have the ability to distinguish it all. Life is already gray enough, show me something that cheers me up, please.

I know my preference is becoming less popular, but I still do like minimalism

I've really preferred oxygen theme to the current kde one, didn't know that it's still alive.

When I was in highschool, for the first few months of my freshman year I had a couple of classes that took place inside those old "mobile home" style class rooms (idk what they're called lol). They were old, kinda smelly, the AC unit was loud, and I loved it.

But then they finished construction of a new multi-storied building and relocated all those classes. Every classroom was an identical, minimalist cement rectangle with perfectly white walls and high tech whiteboards. I hated it, and actually felt like it made it harder to focus. Nobody agreed with me when I said the old classrooms were better :(

I actually liked Oxygen but the application style and window borders made my poor crappy laptop with ah Intel Core Duo 2 and 3 GB on RAM slower. Had to use QtCurve or disable all animations and gradients and stuff. Maybe it was just ahead of its time, now that pseud-skeumorphism is doing a bit of a pushback.