Leaking Plasma Everywhere!

KDE 4.2 is out and a lot of people are calling it the the KDE 4 release that is desktop ready. Honestly, i've been using "UNSTABLE" branch for a while, and there is a definite improvement between KDE 4.1 and 4.2. Plasma has been a somewhat controversial part of KDE 4, however given time, most people agree that it is the way forward. The technology and ideas in behind Plasma are very progressive and have resulted in the most extensibly beautiful desktop currently available on any form of hardware capable of running KDE 4 ( this sentence took a long time to work out, purely because saying "on the pc" excludes the large variety of platforms that modern desktop Linux supports ). So, having a new pc that can handle some decent Inkscape and Gimp work, i thought i should have a shot at some Plasma theming.

It seems that Plasma theming is actually really well documented, which one might not expect. There is an official 7 step guide to doing it which i partially followed. During the process of making a theme one would probably find this reference of widget component names extremely useful, i know that i found myself refering to it on several occasions. After getting used to many quirks and naming conventions, i ended up with this panel:

There is still more to be done, but this is my first attempt at theming Plasma, and i expect there to be many more in the future. I have been extremely thorough with what has been changed on this theme, and the panel is designed for each edge of the screen and non maximized versions ( from KDE 4.2 onwards there are theming differences ). All of the theme work is done in inkscape and i have dispose of a lot of the raster graphics which have clearly been imported from something like Gimp into the default Plasma theme. The theme currently resides here, but i am hoping to work out how to get it into the Hot New Stuff section within the theme selection dialog.

The desktop background in the theme screenshots can be found here, and is a great collection of Linux-tan desktops.

[Edit: Thanks to Jos Poortvliet for adding the comment, and yes it seems that when posting on kde-look.org, it automatically goes into the Get Hot New Stuff section. Last night i downloaded it onto my wife's KDE 4.2 Beta 1 desktop and it worked brilliantly]