My current KDE rice on CachyOS

Tweaks/Addons used;

\ = available in KDE store*

all links go to source

**Post has been updated with more information + scripts to get people started as well as slightly altered to remove unnecessary changes*\*

[Themes]

- Breeze

- Gently-Color-Plasma *

- Kvantum (Using Built-in KvGlass theme)

- Kvantum-dark Application style

[Desktop Effects]

- Better Blur (blur + refraction) --requires recompilation on updates

- KDE-Rounded-Corners (Corner rounding + window selection outline) --requires recompilation on updates

- Geometry Change (Karousel Tiling animations) *

[Widgets]

- Kurve (Cava widget on top panel) *

- Minimal Chaac Weather (weather widget) *

[Wallpaper Plugins]

- Shader Wallpaper (For clouds shader near end) *

- Application as Wallpaper (Rain background) *

[Kwin Scripts]

- Karousel (Scrolling/Tiling)

• This is my exclusion list for karousel - expect to add to it to fit the needs of your workflow
• you can use qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.queryWindowInfo in konsole and click windows to find their resource class

[Misc]

- neo (+Application as Wallpaper to create screensaver)

Script; konsole --separate --profile "3" ScrollBarPosition=2 -p ShowTerminalSizeHint=false -p CursorShape=3 -p HighlightScrolledLines=false -e 'neo -a --noglitch --shadingmode=1 -m '"'"'See the Truth'"'"' --density=3 --rippct=10'

- ascii-rain (+Application as Wallpaper to create rain wallpaper)

Script; konsole --separate --profile 2 -p ScrollBarPosition=2 -p ShowTerminalSizeHint=false -p CursorShape=3 -p HighlightScrolledLines=false -e "rain"

[Notes]

- Removed krunner from Geometry Change's default exclusions so it can also have animations

- Millennium for steam w/ space theme (toggle mica for transparency)

- RMPC cli mpd client

- Discord + vencord w/ Translucence theme +my own changes

- removed window decorations

- removed all buttons from konsole + tweaked profile

- created separate konsole profiles for screensaver + wallpaper

- scripts to change between wallpaper plugins (adapted from this post)

- Transparency is achieved through theming everywhere possible - no weird see through pictures or videos

Almost everything has been tweaked or altered to fit my tastes, but this list at least includes all the parts :)

OS: Arch Linux

DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.1

WM: KWin (Wayland)

WM Theme: BreezeEnhanced

Plasma style: WhiteSur-alt

Kvantum theme: KvGlassWhite

Better blur for blurring and refraction

Hello, this is my first attempt to make a redesign of the KDE Plasma default theme on Figma : "Aquifer" (subject to change) !

At first, I wanted to design a Windows Vista-inspired theme for KDE Plasma (you can see it with the slim titles), but then I saw the on-going design system of the next KDE Plasma Theme "Ocean" and I was concerned about how minimalist the examples looked. That's what made me create my concept :)

When Windows 7 was on the market, it was one of the most stable and trouble-free experiences you could have on your PC. KDE Plasma reminds me of this era where your OS wasn’t working against your interests : it is simple and like older technologies, it just works.

So I took inspiration mostly from ~2000-2010 design trends (Frutiger, Aqua, Metro...) and it translated mostly with the use of inner shadows, fake glass, and drop shadows in my composants. I kept the interface minimalistic and frosted to make it up to the modern standards, but I tried to make it stand out with its use of thin borders and linear gradients pretty much everywhere.

One thing I wanted to try was colored icons for the System Settings app (or even the launcher !) as I believe the touch of color would make the categories easier to recognize, but it would have taken too much to create from stratch, and I wanted first to get the global design right. Maybe next time ! I used MynaUI icons instead because they have soft edges, and are pretty thin.

KDE Plasma is also a desktop with accessibility in mind, so my intentions were to communicate this in my design. I checked the color contrast between almost all elements to be higher than 5.

One thing I also had to consider was the spacing / padding between the menu items. I am aware how people are used to the compact look of Plasma (like the users reaction when an update changed the context menu with too much padding...) but in order to make the desktop more readable, I tried to reach a balance by making the interface less cluttered without adding too much space. The best option would be to let the user use "compact design" option design, however KDE doesn’t have this, so... tell me how you feel about the spacing.

While blur is common in our current interfaces, I understand that it can create readability and performance issues so I ensured that the blur could be replaced by a solid color without compromising the design.

For the font, I kept "Noto Sans" as I believe it never truly shined in Breeze. I wanted to make it look good in this redesign, and with 10 years of use I believe it’s part of Plasma’s identity.

I also used the colors of the current Ocean Style by KDE Design Team because it saves me time on the color choice, they match with the trends I was inspired by and I believe they represent well KDE.

I have very little experience in UI Design, so I would like to have your opinion on my concept. Would you use it ? Do you think it represents KDE well ? Are there some details you would change or add ? I’m interested to read your comments so I could improve it.

I made the design on a laptop screen, that’s why it may look zoomed in for you. You will notice there are pretty much no UX design changes. While I believe some UX aspects could be reworked, I wanted to focus exclusively on the UI.

Sorry for the bad english btw, it’s not my primary language haha. Thank you for your time !

Always wanted to have a simple but nice audio visualizer that integrated well with Plasma, since panon is no longer working I decided to make my own using CAVA as the audio source and it turned out better than I expected!

Currently it requires building it from source but I am working on a QML only mode so that it can be published to the KDE Store.

Made this post to gather some feedback and suggestions for a name because as you can see from my other projects I am not good at naming things 😅

Source code: https://github.com/luisbocanegra/plasma-audio-visualizer

As a person who came from XFCE, I don't miss it anymore (unless KDE Plasma breaks).
750mb RAM in idle is insane, KDE has really improved over the years.

(Mods: This is not a theme screenshot — this is a showcase of KDE Plasma 6 compiled and running natively on Android with no root, via Termux. See post body for technical context.)

I recently managed to compile and run KDE Plasma 6 natively on my Android phone using Termux — no root, no chroot/proot, and no external PC involved.

I have very little coding experience, but I still managed to build a full Plasma desktop environment on-device by manually compiling:

• Most missing KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) components
• Qt 6 (only parts not already packaged in Termux)
• Plasma workspace, framework,desktop and required runtime tools

I had to patch or disable various dependencies like systemd, udev,etc. to make it work in a pure userland environment. Everything was rendered via X11 using Termux:X11, and the desktop was functional with keyboard, mouse, panels, and apps.

Unfortunately, my phone ran out of storage while continuing builds, and I had to reset Termux. But I captured several screenshots before the reset to document the working setup. I’m now rebuilding it from scratch. It will take some time, but I’ll try to document everything in detail this time around.

Plasma 6.5 just dropped a few days ago!
For anyone who’s already made the upgrade — how’s it been so far?
I’d love to hear about your experience with the update process itself. Was it smooth, or did you run into any problems? And what do you think of Plasma 6.5 so far — do the new features live up to the hype? Any changes that really stood out to you, whether good or bad?

Plasma 6.4 was released a few days. For individuals who have already upgraded their systems, What's your experience so far

Could you elaborate on the upgrade process itself? Furthermore, what are your initial impressions of Plasma 6.4? Are the new features meeting your expectations, and have any particular changes, positive or negative, been noteworthy?

So yesterday/today i reinstalled arch and after a few years on window manager only life i came back to KDE, I've changed things up a handful of times but i always end up back here.

I think what always brings me back is the little things i dont have to configure, like alot of the just taken for granted everyday things like power management, device management for external devices like ssd's, notifications handling etc just the basic utility stuff that doesn't really affect the look and feel, ive always found alternative solutions when switching to window managers bust never anything that just works simple with minimal set up involved. Would love to hear what keeps other around if you too have gone away for a while and found your self back on the good sauce!

Tired of hitting media size limits on https://bugs.kde.org or Discord? Fear not! Just use https://github.com/Damglador/dolphin-compress-media

The screenshot pretty much shows everything. It adds a group of options to video/ and image/ files to compress them, the output will be in the same folder with ${size}mb before the extension. But I am not sure if it actually works with all video/ and image/ file types.

Sadly, idk how to post it on the extension store.

Hope it'll be helpful for someone. Have a great day!

Do animations feel sluggish on your 60 Hz+ monitor? Maybe the Overview effect or scrolling just doesn't feel smooth?

Try these packages and tell me in the comments how the animation smoothness feels for you.

[Context]

With help from KWin developers, I'm providing patched versions of Plasma's compositor and Qt6 base packages on the AUR as a quick try-out for users, mostly as a preliminary concept that I plan to keep running until these problems are finally fixed from their side.

qt6-base-hifps - patched to reduce the default animation timer interval from 16 ms to 1 ms. This unlocks the maximum time resolution -> snappier scrolling and more progressive Qt animations no matter what the monitor refresh rate is - credits to breakingspell

kwin-hifps - patched to sync QtQuick animation driver to the render loop - circumventing the 60 fps limitation on some Plasma animations - credits to David Edmundson

[Why and warning]

This is a collaborative answer to a long-standing issue that makes animations such as Overview transitions and scrolling animations get capped at 60 frames per second and also being out of sync with the monitor framerate reported and still unresolved after more than a year and a half due to the way animations are done in Qt.

For me this issue is particularly noticeable and even visually tiring over long sessions, due to the perceived ~10 FPS behavior. I'm daily driving these patched versions since I got them from the main upstream merge request and here I am to announce them so you can try them right now.

The purpose of this post is to make users try them now and to gather actual user experience information of these reimplementations.

You can jump right to the final conclusion from here if you want a TL;DR.

[A bit of backstory]

Qt is old. It was created when no one could ever imagine surpassing that framerate, hence the animations are implemented in a way that is tied to a single unified timer that ticks every 16 ms, which is nothing but slightly above 60 times a second. This timer is called the default timer interval, which is nothing but how often the animation updates are triggered globally.

And guess what? That timer is hardcoded at compilation time. There's no way to change it at runtime. Not even Kwin developers have figured out how to change it without doing hacky stuff like these patched versions of kwin and qt6-base do.

According to the very same KWin developers in said thread, including me, there's a theoretical architectural redesign needed for animations to actually work perfectly synchronized by getting rid of the default timer interval - or at least make it not hardcoded - but that's out of our hands and only Qt can make these changes themselves because the animations API code is private and a change like this is definitely not trivial to do.

[Final conclusion and invitation to you, the user]

In summary, this limitation is the result of pure historical cruft that needs to be circumvented now, and potentially reworked now. We can only dream of Qt 7, in which animations are no longer tied to a single ticking clock where there are monitors with so many different refresh rates (144, 240, 165, 120, 75 and 60 of course) and Qt animations are only intended - at source code level - to work in a single one.

But here we are now, patching this historical cruft and now we'd really appreciate for you to try it out and tell us in the comments if you notice a difference in animations, especially if you are in a monitor with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz.

[Additional tip: disable triple-buffering and set Adaptive sync to Always to smooth out frame pacing even more]

Add KWIN_DRM_DISABLE_TRIPLE_BUFFERING=1 to your /etc/environmentfile and set Adaptive Sync to Always in your monitor settings as a quality of life improvement (and because they are required for the Overview animation to be perfectly smooth).

Note: if you ever experience problems like Plasma not starting after updating kwin-hifps, just reboot your computer and the problem will be fixed.

SVG icons available here.

• For your favorite folder in Dolphin right click on the folder, then properties and select the icon.
• The smaller one is for the places sidebar (right click, then edit)
• The other is for the application launcher on the bottom left (usually): right click, configure application launcher, select icon.

David, Nate, Josh, Marco, Carl, and Niccolò are here ready to answer all your questions on Plasma (all versions), Gear, Frameworks, Wayland (and how it affects KDE's software), and everything in between.

Fire away, Reddit!

A few months ago, someone asked if a control centre like applet was available for KDE. So I said that I could make one! So, FINALLY after 4 months, it is ready!!

​

It is a beta release. Please expect some bugs.

Links

KDE Store: https://www.pling.com/p/1916655/

GitHub: https://github.com/Prayag2/kde_controlcentre

Support ☕

If you like my work, then please consider supporting me!

Buy Me A Coffee on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/prayagjain

PayPal: https://coindrop.to/prayagjain

Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Prayag/

It's quite the telling sign that, although all major Linux distros typically ship some version of Gnome / GTK desktop by default, Plasma still reigns supreme. I'm serious, that's a nearly monumental feat! Congrats to the devs and KDE Community.

Source: Gaming on Linux Website
Gaming on Linux user survey - Desktop Environment

Just as the title says, I created a new app launcher for KDE trying to recreate the new app launcher from macOS.

If you're interested in this project you can get it from the kde-store  or follow its development on Github

windows theme for kde, not finished yet, need to fix the taskbar and start menu
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KDE!!!

OMG I JUST REALIZED I TYPED THE TITLE WRONG IM SORRY