After fiddling with a Gentoo based system (using plasmashell 5.6.5) I got a look that suits me. By combining different elements of these two themes:

Arquetype-Dark
Breeze Dark Classic (5.4 look)

I.e. using one color scheme (mixing color schemes between themes in preferences has been removed from 5.5.5 and onwards) from one theme on top of another gave me what I wanted. Initially, it looked exactly the way I wanted it to, but after applying updates to the Plasma shell (don't know if I dare updating to 5.7.3 because I like the current sddm lock/login screen as it is), I had to spend hours on correcting for the changes to my current theme these updates applied.

This is about the bottom bar of the desktop, kicker-panel maybe it is called.

I have now made another KDE/Plasma 5 install of linux, other than Gentoo, and I cannot get the same looks on the bottom bar as on my Gentoo install.


This is what I want things to look like:



I want that hovering green line above instead of having the applications encapsulated in boxes. When doing a ubuntu install, this is what I get:



I like the font and the blurring translucency of this panel, but I want to be rid of those boxes and replace them with top bars as in the picture above. Does anyone know how to do that and what config/xml/css files to look into?

Does anyone know where the current theme files are located now that it is "customized" in the settings?

g00ey wrote:After fiddling with a Gentoo based system (using plasmashell 5.6.5) I got a look that suits me. By combining different elements of these two themes:

Arquetype-Dark
Breeze Dark Classic (5.4 look)

I want that hovering green line above instead of having the applications encapsulated in boxes. When doing a ubuntu install, this is what I get:

I like the font and the blurring translucency of this panel, but I want to be rid of those boxes and replace them with top bars as in the picture above. Does anyone know how to do that and what config/xml/css files to look into?

Does anyone know where the current theme files are located now that it is "customized" in the settings?

Plasma-devel: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
--> task manager lines instead of blocks: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-d ... 56782.html

Development/Tutorials/Plasma5: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma5
Development/Tutorials/Plasma5/ThemeDetails: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tu ... emeDetails

I found a way to locate the files. I installed plasma-sdk. In that package I found Plasma Explorer. Strangely enough, I cannot edit the elements through this explorer; if I click the "edit element" button nothing happens. I cannot edit colors either, there is no button for that at all. There I could browse around and identify the elements which I wanted to change. The name of the elements I wanted to change was widgets/clock that had a white face which doesn't fit to my dark theme. The other element that I wanted to change was the style of the bottom panel which I identified as widgets/tasks. So the command

locate widgets/tasks | xargs ls -l

located the files and showed the file size attributes of these files which made it easier for me to distinguish tween them. So I copied these files from my Gentoo installation to different locations of my Ubuntu installation; ~/.../.custom, ~/.../breeze-dark, /usr/.../default, and /usr/.../breeze-dark.

After a logout/login the changes had a desired effect. But they also had undesired effects. Plasmashell crashed or whatever program in plasma it was that usually crash during logout (plasmashell 5.5.5). The login splash changed background. When logged in, transparency was gone and the font at the bottom bar is small and compressed.

I managed to get transparency back by changing compositor to OpenGL 3.1 in the system settings (under Hardware -> Display and Monitor). I could get the bottom bar to a fairly normal state by "edit widgets" and resize bottom bar.

But the font of the text at the "tasks" panel is still small and the text is close to the top bar:



Some corruption must have occurred as I didn't touch any of these settings and it didn't look like that initially, only after a second re-login that resulted in crashing the plasma-engine or whatever application related to it that crashed. I didn't take note as this is not the latest version of plasma/KDE so a bug-report wouldn't be useful I surmise.

In "Display and Monitor" I have discovered that I have no "1920x1080" option anymore, perhaps this is the culprit. The screen resolution is "set" to 800x600 (the actual physical resolution is still 1920x1080). In advanced there is a "scale display" option. I dare not touch it as the rest of the system is properly scaled. The problem with the task text is not only the size but also the vertical alignment as shown in the image above.

Perhaps there are some "dpi" settings that need to be changed, any ideas where to find?

Edit: I've managed to restore the font size and alignment by switching between different compositors. I think there is a bug in them that corrupts the layout. But now the clock and the toolbar icons are remarkably big:



I would have preferred that they were a tiny bit smaller. I could adjust this by lowering the height of this bar. I would have preferred some vertical padding in the toolbar and clock, just a pixel or two.

Edit: Yup, the composers are broken in KDE, especially XRender

Perhaps it is a bit "off topic" here but I like to explain how I make the icons in the tool bar smaller. I give the commands:

Code: Select all

sudo sed -i 's/property int itemSize: units.roundToIconSize(Math.min(Math.min(width, height), units.iconSizes.medium))/property int itemSize: units.roundToIconSize(Math.min(Math.min(width, height), units.iconSizes.smallMedium))/' /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.private.systemtray/contents/ui/main.qml

This works every time for me. I am using neon kde.

After an update of plasmashell it is possible that the icons are too big again and then I just re-run this command