Echoing my comment from T12432:

I think a big part of the problem here is that the toolkit itself doesn't do a good enough job of providing a visually pleasing default appearance tailored to each form factor, so each app tries to fix this itself, naturally in all different ways. So you get differences between apps in sidebar background color, sidebar width, sidebar list appearance, sidebar icon style and size, toolbar appearance, sidebar header style (picture vs toolbar vs nothing), main view background color, etc.

Essentially I think the toolkit leaves a bit too much up to the developer to DIY things rather than providing better form-factor-specific defaults that can then be easily overridden if necessary. I think it needs the following, at a minimum:

• Automatically hide the header image (if present) on the desktop and replace it with a toolbar above the sidebar
• Default to the view bg color for the sidebar (aka white)
• Default to a narrower sidebar width, and add a resizable splitter for the sidebar on the desktop
• Default to giving every page/main view a toolbar with the page's title in it, even if there's nothing else in the toolbar

Obviously an app should be able to override these, but I think it would make sense to use more "opinionated" defaults to nudge the ecosystem in the direction of more consistency. IMO there's nothing wrong with a piece of software or a UI toolkit being opinionated about how it wants to be used if there's a way for the user or developer to override that in the case where the default opinion doesn't make sense.

Personally I think this would be a good layout to enforce onto our applications:

Maybe we could create kirigami components for common things present in all apps (e.g sidebars)
and update the kirigami template app to utilize these new components so when creating a new application (through the template) it would
already be consistent with everything else .

https://develop.kde.org/hig/ < let's not reinvent the wheel. Whatever is there can be addressed if it doesn't fit. If an application doesn't fit the HIG it can definitely be addressed.

Sure but I think we should make it easier to follow the HIG, creating common components, good defaults, etc...

In T12435#260970, @fhek wrote:

Personally I think this would be a good layout to enforce onto our applications

I dislike the idea of "enforcing" a specific layout. Maybe "enforcing" isn't the word you really meant, but it would be bad for the user experience to force a specific layout without first considering if it's the right layout. It's better to recommend some standard layouts in the absence of designers who are able to come up with the right layout.

Yeah, enforcing wasn't a good word in this context.

Sure, we should totally consider if that's the right layout for our applications, I just wanted to restart this discussion and I thought an image would be a good way to represent my idea. :)