The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival

# The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival Source: [https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/05/10/the-anti-minimalist-backlash-is-the-bigger-story-behind-oxygens-revival/](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/05/10/the-anti-minimalist-backlash-is-the-bigger-story-behind-oxygens-revival/) [](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-2.png)Image by: Nuno Pinheiro Following[posts](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/halfway-there-to-6-7-updates-on-oxygen-and-air/)on specific work being done on Oxygen, this post is going to try to go beyond the manifest work and look at the bigger picture driving it\. The motivation for writing it came when I was listening to a[music artist](https://www.youtube.com/@frutigerdillon)who had completely rebranded himself by appending “Frutiger” to his name\. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back\. It dawned on me right there and then that I had been seeing a lot of this very phenomenon lately\. The easiest descriptor for it would be nostalgia\. But I would claim there’s a lot more to it than that\. We don’t need to look much farther than the KDE world for examples\. The most prominent one is probably the valiant effort called`aeroshell`\. It’s arguably even more telling than redefining your whole music brand around Frutiger Aero nostalgia, since it means people are actually maintaining forks of core KDE Plasma components just to make the desktop look like Windows 7\. And then of course there is our own Oxygen restoration project, polishing a KDE theme of the past into something presentable in the present\. Browsing social media, I also can’t help but notice a certainly not small amount of[retro\-yearning posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1t4tlj3/is_there_anyway_to_make_kde_look_more_retro/)\. Those restoration efforts, those posts, and the outpour of positive messages surrounding the Oxygen restoration \(which was honestly much stronger than we expected\) tell an important story\. Not just about design preferences, but about unmet needs\. The easy reading is nostalgia: people miss what they grew up with, and that’s that\. But I don’t think sentiment alone explains the scale and persistence of what we’re seeing\. To understand it better, it helps to look at a parallel that might seem distant at first: architecture\. “The less is bore” statement did not emerge in graphic design\. It emerged from architectural criticism, precisely because the same tension plays out there, even more visibly\. Like with Oxygen or Aeroshell, there is currently, for instance, a movement called[Architectural Uprising](https://www.architecturaluprising.com/), linked to projects such as[The Aesthetic City](https://theaestheticcity.com/), which recently conducted a survey comparing classical and modernist architecture: [](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image.png)Source:[The Aesthetic City](https://theaestheticcity.com/research/)In all of the cases, and[in some other surveys](https://www.dezeen.com/2025/10/30/traditional-architecture/), most respondents found classical architecture more appealing than modernist one\. While it would be interesting to do a similar survey comparing older skeuomorphic graphic design and the newer minimalist, we can already learn a lot from the example from architecture\. What these older and newer designs, whether in architecture or on your desktop, actually differ on comes down to two major things: their*attitude towards ornamentation*, and their understanding of the r*elationship between form and function*\. The minimalist and flat approach shuns ornamentation, which often tends to go hand in hand with prioritizing function over form\. Within this logic, it makes sense to build a KDE theme, or a building, out of plain rectangles and nothing more\. The maximalist and skeuomorphic approach, on the other hand, while not neglecting function, is permissive towards things existing simply for the sake of being beautiful\. Minimalism’s dominance has been driven by several factors\. It isn’t purely an aesthetic or philosophical choice\. Some designers, particularly in graphic design, may not be pondering these questions on any abstract level at all; for some it has simply been about chasing trends\. But more important than that are the structural reasons\. A minimalist approach means less labor, less skill required, and it means the ability to produce more\. Just think of how long it takes to craft a skeuomorphic icon compared to a symbolic monochrome one\. In a consumerist and ever\-faster globalized society, that’s a powerful incentive – one that has little to do with anyone’s design philosophy\. Minimalism didn’t win just because designers preferred it\. It won, at least in part, because it’s cheaper\. And that matters, because it means the yearning for something richer isn’t irrational nostalgia… it’s also a response to being given less than what design can offer\. So as the beautifully shot video I’d like to share below puts it, a lot of contemporary design “gets the job done, but not much else\.” It’s clean, it’s professional, it’s functional\. It’s also boring and hard\-pressed to elicit much emotion\. The video also raises a point that stuck with me: associating “modern” with “minimalist” is ultimately a choice, not a given\. It is us who have come to treat flatness and lack of detail as the markers of contemporaneity\. > ## **That being said… I don’t think going back is the solution\.** I don’t think reverting to dominantly building buildings the way we did 200 years ago is the answer\. I don’t think making Oxygen or a faux\-Oxygen the default KDE theme again is the answer either\. And here’s why: what the nostalgia aesthetics are pointing at isn’t really just the past\. It’s also about “the future that was promised” and never delivered\. Growing up in the 2000s, in the Frutiger Aero era if you will, I genuinely imagined the future was going to look like a sci\-fi utopia\. That we’d see new, striking buildings made possible by technologies that didn’t exist before, blending cohesively with their environments\. [](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-4-1.png)Artist: Hiro Isono Yet instead of that… both in computer design and in architecture,**in times when our possibilities are greater than ever**, we are far too often producing… dull\. grey\. boxes\. These boxes are everywhere\. And neither one of them is particularly different than the other\. [](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-5.png)Is this the future we were hoping to live in?That’s the real story underneath the retro\-yearning\. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back\. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy\. It doesn’t have personality\. It doesn’t feel warm\. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done\. The escapism towards the past is a symptom\. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality\. There are signs that something is shifting, at least in UI design\. Vulgar minimalism seems to be slowly on its way out, both from a[UX standpoint](https://uxdesign.cc/material-3-expressive-building-on-the-failures-of-flat-design-d7a9bb627298)and in some visual directions\. Apple’s Liquid Glass and newer Microsoft iconography are genuinely interesting departures from flat design\. [](https://filipfila.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-3.png)This doesn’t just do its job, it’s also unnecessarily beautifulAnd at the same time we still seem to be somehow quite distant from what made the UI design of the pasts so loved\. So what would be my takeaways for getting there, for future designs and designing? Just three simple points: - Preserving the past is laudable, but we should also try to build something new instead of recyling it\. - The new we build should try to be interesting, have personality, and provide a warm environment for users\. - The new should \(re\-\)embrace ornamentation and things being beautiful just for the sake of being beautiful\.