For a couple years, I've been using Manjaro Linux on my laptop for school. I installed the XFCE edition and used i3 on it for a long time, but I've recently dipped my toes in Plasma. Unfortunately, I've been seeing abnormally dark text in my settings configurations. However, it's not consistent, usually appearing exactly as I'd expect.

Here's an example of the issue:


I understand lots of complications come with installing multiple DEs, but I genuinely don't want to switch back to XFCE and don't mind "breaking" things in that respect. So with that in mind, as a total Plasma beginner, where can I look to fix this issue? Thanks in advance!

Manjaro use a custom Plasma style, color scheme, etc. You can easily change this in System Settings. Either try a completely different global theme, or just try switching out different components. here, it is likely the color scheme, which can be tweaked, or changed out for another one.

These settings do not affect Xfce, and vice versa.

Sorry, I suppose some more information is due: if I change the global theme, these specific areas do not seem affected. I'm currently using the Sweet theme, but swapping between others doesn't seem to change anything. Interestingly, changing settings in "Application Style" doesn't seem to do anything at all; no colors are changing.

Do these changes require a restart? And/or...
Is there a specific setting that I could search for here?

What about changing the color scheme, this is where the text colors are changed.

I don't use Manjaro and its custom default theming,, so I can't be certain, but normally look and feel elements either change immediately, or after restarting an application .

If the global theme does not have or use any specific color scheme, it will use whatever is set in System Settings. But the Sweet KDE Global Theme does include a custom color scheme. Is this selected in System Settings?

Hmm, changing colors also seems to not have much effect either, although it was set to Sweet as well. It also appears a bit... odd? Should the editor look like this? (This was just in the basic "System Settings > Color")

if you are unable to change any of these settings, you might have an issue not necessarily related to Plasma itself. File permissions is one, sometimes caused by running some GUI programs with sudo privileges, though I can't speak to how this is done in Manjaro/Arch type of systems.

if you can create a new user account and see if the behavior is different, that might be a good starting point, unless people with more familiarity with your distro can chime in.

Thanks for the suggestion; I had totally forgot that it's recommended to create a separate user for each DE.

I created a brand new user and logged in that way, and quite a few of the weird issues I was seeing were gone, namely issues with widgets. However, the problem relevant to this post remains, just acting a bit different...

I can now read everything fine, but now my window color will not change. I've since restarted my system and the settings windows still have a light theme. Additionally, editing the window style still looks strange, and the "normal" text in various dark mode previews is unreadable:



However, if you look here at the highlighted window, you'll also see a clear Manjaro-styled highlighting present, so I greatly suspect it has something to do with their preset styling.