Hi,
Crystal Dock v2.0 and Crystal Remix icon theme v2.1 are out now!
Crystal Dock v2.0
Crystal Dock is a cool dock (desktop panel) for Linux desktop, with the focus on attractive user interface, being simple and easy to use, and cross-desktop support.
Version 2.0 now supports KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, as well as brings some visual refresh.
KDE Store link: https://store.kde.org/p/2105085
GitHub: https://github.com/dangvd/crystal-dock
Crystal Remix icon theme v2.1
Crystal Remix is a Crystal icon theme for modern Linux desktop environments, created by combining/mixing different versions of the Crystal icon theme (that were originally created for KDE 3 desktop).
Version 2.1 brings updates for KDE Plasma 6.
KDE Store link: https://store.kde.org/p/1226130
GitHub: https://github.com/dangvd/crystal-remix-icon-theme
The image shows Crystal Dock with Crystal Remix icon theme.
Blog post: https://dangvd.blogspot.com/2024/05/crystal-dock-v20-and-crystal-remix-icon.html
Hope you like them, and enjoy the rest of the week!
Very very cool!
I would love to try a more KDE 3 like style on Plasma 6.
Unlike Windows 11, Plasma just got better. But I may prefer the style of Windows 7, it is just more beautiful.
The modern stuff makes a lot of usability sense, and is way simpler. Also theming between GUI Toolkits is easier, for me only GTK, Qt, Electron and a bit libcosmic.
KDE3's Plastik style was closer to XP's Luna than Vista/7's Aero. The default icon theme CrystalSVG had a colorful pastel and cartoonish style. There's a full port of it to Plasma 5 here. It should still work fine in Plasma 6.
The Plasma 4 Oxygen style was much closer to the detailed realistic skeuomorphic style of Aero (though it was probably more so inspired by early OSX Aqua). It is still usable on Plasma 6 and packages for the theme should be available in your preferred distributions' repositories.
Crystal Remix is really a mix of three icon themes designed by Everaldo Coelho in the 2000s. Only the first of these, the aforementioned CrystalSVG, was ever an official KDE theme. The second is Crystal Clear, the successor to CrystalSVG. It had a more detailed and realistic style compared to CrystalSVG, looking far closer to Aero. The third one is Crystal Project, the final iteration of Crystal. It went further into Crystal Clear's direction and erased the last vestiges of CrystalSVG's more cartoonish style. Crystal Project's icons are particularly detailed and I'd consider it a really underappreciated piece of skeuomorphic icon design.
Personally, I'm not that big on Crystal Remix. I'd prefer either a complete CrystalSVG-styled icon theme or a complete Crystal Project-styled icon theme. Preferably the latter because the former already pretty much exists. The two styles don't mesh together all that well, IMO. Crystal Remix's coverage (especially for action icons) is also a bit lacking and it's pretty common to run into unthemed Breeze icons in some applications.
Crystal Dock doesn't strike me as particularly KDE3-ish. It's basically nothing like KDE3's Kicker, though there were a lot of popular third party docks in the KDE3 era like KoolDock, which were actually quite similar to this project. All of them are gone by now and there's been a lot of demand for new third party docks since the death of Latte Dock. So I anticipate this project will make quite a few people happy.
Thanks for all the info and links!
I just always use Breeze exactly because of that "unthemed icons" issue, and also compatibility with the other Toolkits.
Making a new complete icon theme is intense work.
Personally I think the redesigns that are happening to Breeze are the better direction, especially detailed mini icons are damn unusable.
But I will try the other icon sets!
Crystal Remix, in the most recent versions, uses mostly Crystal Project icons because I also think it's the best one out of the three, and also for consistency reason like you said. I will update the project description to reflect this. I will also try to increase the coverage when possible.
It's not a coincidence that Crystal Dock is similar to KoolDock -- they are both based on my previous dock KSmoothDock which I wrote for KDE3 and KDE Plasma 5. KoolDock was a fork of it during KDE3 time, and Crystal Dock is the successor dock. I changed the name mainly to reflect the change from a KDE-only dock to a cross-desktop KDE-first one.
Thanks a lot! Btw I also prefer the colourful, shiny, detailed style of KDE 3/4, Windows Vista/7, MacOSX 10.0 - 10.9 :)