Oxygen 6.7 is here: a breath of fresh air for KDE’s classic theme – Filip Fila's blog

Skip to content

Logo by: Nuno Pinheiro

The year started off bleak. As I was gallivanting through KDE themes at hand, I decided to stick with the Oxygen one. It didn’t take long to notice that this old theme, once the default in the KDE 4 era, wasn’t looking its best. A slew of little bugs had accumulated, and it was clear that Oxygen was in need of some love. Coupling that with a desire to get back into contributing to FOSS and KDE, my first step was to restore the Air theme – a light desktop theme that was the dark Oxygen’s counterpart. The developer response afterwards wasn’t all that positive. At that point, the outlook was still looking bleak.

Giving up right there and then would have left Oxygen as it was. Instead, a different, wonderful timeline emerged. A restoration project was born, met with a surprisingly large and overwhelmingly positive response from users. That response brought with it new contributors, and perhaps most excitingly collaboration with Nuno Pinheiro, Oxygen’s original lead designer, was all of the sudden a thing. Through it all we created a series of fixes that make Oxygen better than it has been in a while. June 16th 2026 is the day some of them land, as part of the Plasma 6.7 release.

For more thoughts and details on the journey that’s led to here, here’s two previous posts:

Beating an old, but not dead horse: what to do with the Oxygen and Air themes?

Halfway there to 6.7: Updates on Oxygen and Air

… as well as an interview that goes more in depth and length. Once again I have to give a shoutout to Brodie Robertson as it was right around the time he posted his first video on Oxygen that the skies began to clear and the horizon started to look a little brighter.

That being said… let’s have a look at some of the fixes we are thrilled to present since the last blog post.

Oxygen icons – updated and back in KDE Frameworks!

We could all probably agree that Oxygen is not quite Oxygen without its iconic icons. Like with the Oxygen theme, there were also some issues with them. A missing icon here and there, a lack of high-resolution versions for some that were present. With a lot of work from Nuno Pinheiro, as well as from a new contributor by the name of Pravin Kumar, the icon set is much more complete now. The main feature is that with Plasma 6.7 it brings consistency in the look of tray icons:

We know some of you prefer having them colorful instead, so for the next release we’d like to make this an icon theme option.

Aside from these tray icons, I’m sure you will spot some hot new colorful ones too:

These new icons are available with the already released oxygen-icons 6.2. But that’s not all… Oxygen icons are also back in the regular KDE Frameworks release cycle. They will now be released with updates every month!

Application style and window decorations improvements

Dolphin will look better with Oxygen

If you’ve used the default KDE file manager, Dolphin, with Oxygen, chances are you ran into a few visuals that didn’t quite look right. The most prominent eyesore was probably the navigation bar when editable mode was turned on:

With KIO 6.27, there will no longer be this awkward second background; as a bonus, a highlight effect reappears:

The navigation bar version that’s used when it’s detached from the main toolbar has also been fixed, but for that change we have to wait for Dolphin 26.08 which comes out in August. In that same release we’ll have a minor fix for filter button background too.

Another place that looked slightly off is the status bar, when in "small" mode. With Oxygen 6.7, this will be improved, although not made perfect. Screenshots in the merge request.

Ultimately, this small mode does not gel great conceptually with Oxygen due to Oxygen’s glow around the content view. We’d therefore recommend Oxygen users to use to the full-width statusbar:

Dolphin -> App Menu -> Configure Dolphin -> Interface -> Status & Location bar -> Set Statusbar to "Full width"

Oxygen’s very own korners bug fixed

A few months ago there was an amusing Reddit post with some very laudable detective work behind it regarding missing pixels in Oxygen’s menus.

It seems there's "hardcoded" pixels in rounded edges.<br>byu/ghulamalchik inkde

Well, we didn’t end up deleting KDE… only those pixels:

Glow effect around windows no longer looks pixelated with fractional scaling

Thanks to Melissa Autumn, the Oxygen window decoration glow no longer looks pixelated with fractional scaling.

Missing titlebar buttons added

Some of you might have added an application menu to your window titlebars, only to notice the icon is exactly the same as the app icon. That wasn’t a feature, but rather a bug; the hamburger menu code was there the whole time, just hiding. The same isn’t true for the button that disables screen recording of windows, which is a new addition:

One final, honorable mention for style...