Then let's see what will be improved in future releases.
## What do I mean with 'KDE Applications'
If I speak about 'KDE Applications' here I talk about applications like Kate, Konsole, Okular and others like that.
This means applications developed with Qt and KDE Frameworks that integrate well with the KDE Plasma desktop but are not restricted to it.
Many of this applications not just aim to work well on Linux & BSD or other open source operating systems but are ported and working well on the rather different Windows and macOS desktop. Some even are successful since years in the official Windows Store.
The above applications are part of the KDE Gear releases, but the described issues and solutions naturally are not restricted to stuff released with that.
What most of these applications have in common is that they rely on rather large parts of our Frameworks.
With that they depend at least indirectly on an icon set that covers large parts of what our default icon set Breeze provides.
Even if you use no icons from that icon set yourself in your application, just using the standard actions or many widgets/dialogs from Frameworks will rely on some subset of Breeze.
Below a screenshot of Kate 24.02 running on Plasma 6. All icons are there, they are properly re-colored for the dark theme, too, including not just the used Breeze icons but for example the small Git icons in the left sidebar that Kate has bundled.
After covering Plasma and the two large closed-source desktop operating systems, as a small excursion, look how Kate (the KF5 based version) looks if installed on [Haiku](https://www.haiku-os.org/) with the package they provide.
I was unable to trigger Kate or Okular to adjust to the dark mode GNOME provides, therefore I can not test if we end up with black on black icons there, but it is likely, as the fallback is just Breeze.
Just unreadable icons, beside out own Git icon and the few colored ones.
## Summary: What's up with Icons today
The icons in KDE applications do look perfect on KDE Plasma.
That should be no real surprise as many people working on these applications will test them there and KDE Frameworks and Qt are well tested on Plasma, too.
The icons look fine on Windows and macOS, too, at least for applications that got properly ported, but only thanks to patches we do in Craft.
If you just grab e.g. Kate's and the needed frameworks sources from our normal repositories, you don't get that.
If the maintainers of the port for some OS do care, like the Haiku people, KDE applications can look fine there.
On other desktop environments it doesn't look that great out of the box.
Unlike for the other operating systems, there the same packages without extra patches are running.
Whereas that works perfect on Plasma, we rely too much that the desktop environment running provides an icon set that has a similar coverage and naming as Breeze. As we don't hard depend on the Breeze icons for our applications, it can even happen that just no fitting icons are there per default.
Even if that can be solved with some better package dependencies, you still end up with a patchwork look and without a Qt platform theme plugin that handles the needed recoloring to make dark mode feasible.
