On 25 October 2025, a post on the KDE and Plasma Design blog said the Ocean design system is leaving Figma for Penpot. The byline on the post is anditosan. The KDE GitLab profile for that site is Andy Betts, UI/UX designer at KDE. The post is first-party. It does not describe a failed Figma export.
Penpot had gained the features they needed for a design system, so they started cleaning assets up and moving them. The Ocean Design Systems Foundations library is the Penpot file that holds the graphical assets. Shared assets are the new part.
On top of the foundations they are building the pieces designers compose with. Buttons, sliders, progress bars. The goal is small UI elements a developer can pick up.
Penpot variants are the feature he calls out. A component can carry states, such as a badge with an icon or an avatar. You drop it and switch size, state, and type, instead of drawing each version by hand.
What is public, and what is not in the desktop yet
They publish the library by exporting the Penpot file and pushing it to GitLab, so other people can clone the same assets. The repo is invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design. He says that location is a personal project and that it is moving to a Plasma project. I opened the project page. It is still under the abetts namespace.
The components are not in Plasma yet. They are waiting on the Union engine. Two jobs remain in his list. Finish migrating the rest of the assets. Draw new application icons to replace the colorful set.
He also lists Penpot Fest 2025 announcements they want. A new renderer based on Skia and WebAssembly, which they signed up to beta test. Layer blur, and more tokens for type and for multi-layer shadows. Better shape control, which matters if Ocean icons are drawn in Penpot. Those items are Penpot’s roadmap as he heard it. They are not features Ocean already depends on.
The post never says how the Figma file was exported, which effects broke, or which fonts were missing. The Figma → Penpot playbook is where those failure modes live. A file can look right and still lose components, variants, and tokens. His write-up starts after the foundations library exists in Penpot.
What I would copy
Treat “we are migrating” as a status, not a finished move. Ocean’s foundations are in Penpot. The rest of the assets are still in progress. The desktop does not use the new UI yet. If you announce a design-tool move, say which library is in the new tool and which file is still in the old one.
Put the exported file in the project’s repo, not only in a personal namespace. He already flagged that handoff. Until it happens, bus factor sits on one GitLab user.
Do not wait for a conference roadmap. Variants are why they could design in Penpot. The Skia renderer is a beta they joined. Ship on the feature you have.
When you do export from Figma, check variants and shared components against the playbook before you delete the Figma file. This post does not show that check.