KDE is bringing back the Oxygen and Air themes, here's what they look like

Oxygen and its close sibling, Air, were removed back in 2024. Now, KDE is restoring them as optional packages for Plasma 6.7.

KDE 4.0 was released in 2008 with the "Oxygen" theme that arguably defined the "classic" KDE look. It featured glassy transparencies, glossy buttons, and rich, detailed icons. Another theme, "Air," was released about a year later in 2009, bringing a lighter alternative that users felt was the perfect light theme while Oxygen served as the dark counterpart.

But the release of KDE Plasma 6 (in early 2024) marked the beginning of the end for these looks. Air was removed from libplasma, the core library, before the official launch. Its older sibling, Oxygen, managed to survive slightly longer but was eventually dropped as a default, pre-installed Plasma style in Plasma 6.2 (released in October 2024).

As David Edmundson (a prominent KDE developer) pointed out, the reason Oxygen and Air were removed was that shipping a theme as a first-party component came with a lot of technical debt and a "huge maintenance burden."

Now, there's a new community-led effort to restore both themes, aiming to get them ready in time for KDE's 30th anniversary. KDE contributor, Filip Fila, recently published an update on the restoration project. The work addresses long-standing visual glitches on Wayland when display scaling is enabled and brings back Oxygen-themed highlights in the Dolphin file manager.

This project has support from other KDE developers like Akseli Lahtinen and even Nuno Pinheiro, the original lead designer of the Oxygen Project. The team fixed some of the worst bugs, like pixelated window buttons and incorrect shadow backgrounds when running on Wayland with scaling enabled. These fixes are scheduled to land tomorrow with Plasma 6.6.4.

Before this work, the Oxygen theme was in a really bad shape. Its color scheme was just wrong, which resulted in unreadable text in some widgets. The panel had absolutely no concept of orientation, so if you used a vertical panel, you got a completely wrong and overstretched glow line. The developers completely reworked the panel to respect orientation and even added support for margin separators.

A new switch SVG was also added:

Other visual and functional issues have been addressed, including correcting the System Monitor widget's unreadable text caused by the wrong color scheme and adding a minimized state graphic to the taskbar so users can distinguish minimized and pinned windows.

Air, on the other hand, was in a more usable state but was not "airy" enough. The main problem was a lack of transparency. The team did a substantial rework of the widget background SVG to restore the classic transparency levels, now enhanced with a modern blur effect, and Developer Marco Martin patched a rendering flaw where the blur effect caused ugly smudging around widget corners.

Air and Oxygen are slated to return as restored, optional packages in KDE Plasma 6.7. But you can try it out now by downloading the themes and placing the unzipped folders in .local/share/plasma/desktoptheme. (Download link for Air | Download link for Oxygen)

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Posted Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 5:34 am AEST (my time).

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