KDE developer Kai Uwe has published a blog post, in which he talks about a Windows 8 Metro Inspired sidebar and appearance. Presently there are themes and packs, that makes KDE Plasma to mimic Unity Shell and GNOME shell. It appears that a metro inspired look and feel is a fresh idea for KDE.
Read complete blog post in Kai Uwe's blog.
This is an experimental Metro-inspired (Metro, U-Bahn, get it?) sidebar. Its name kinda shows how serious I was about this :) Anyhow, it’s a nice showcase of Plasma’s flexibility. The whole thing took me just over an hour to get up and running. It incorporates KRunner/Milou for search results, the Purpose Framework for sharing, parts of Print-Manager and Device Notifier, as well as the icons from Plasma-PA (audio) and Plasma-NM (network) on the Settings page. The centre button was supposed to launch the Application Dashboard, without tiles, though.
Read complete blog post in Kai Uwe's blog.