Moving KDE's styling into the future
Quoting: Moving KDE's styling into the future | Quantum Productions —
Last year during Akademy I gave a talk called Union: The Future of Styling in KDE?!. In this talk I presented a problem: We currently have four ways of styling our applications. Not only that, but some of these approaches are quite hard to work with, especially for designers who lack programming skills. This all leads to it being incredibly hard to make changes to our application styling currently, which is not only a problem for something like the Plasma Next Initiative, but even smaller changes take a lot of effort.
This problem is not new; we already identified it several years ago. Unfortunately, it also is not easy to solve. Some of the reasons it got to this state are simply inertia. Some things like Plasma's SVG styling were developed as a way to improve styling in an era where a lot of the technologies we currently use did not exist yet. The solutions developed in those days have now existed for a pretty long time so we cannot suddenly drop them. Other reasons are more technical in nature, such as completely different rendering stacks.