I'm using trunk (neon packages for ubuntu) and, after certain update, my panels have an ugly blue background color. I've been searching a way to change that color, but couldn't find one :(

If you enable composite, the panel will turn transparent.

The other option is to use another theme. In System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Theme Details you can change the theme of individual items - such as the panel background.

Hans wrote:If you enable composite, the panel will turn transparent.

In theory

Hans wrote:The other option is to use another theme. In System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Theme Details you can change the theme of individual items - such as the panel background.

Yeah, that's true. But there you can only choose between different plasma themes. You can't choose the background color of the panel directly. Anyway it doesn't works, if I tell KDE to use elegance for the panel it just ignore me and do nothing

I think the developers have reasoned like this: "In Plasma, the theme creator should have the power to decide the colors".
Some themes follow your color scheme (e.g. Aya).

The reason it ignores you is probably because you still use Oxygen as your Plasma theme. Did you change theme (to (Custom) or something like that) after the panel modification?

Finally, you can try this application that I just found. Not sure it works with the newer versions of Plasma though.

Hans wrote:I think the developers have reasoned like this: "In Plasma, the theme creator should have the power to decide the colors".
Some themes follow your color scheme (e.g. Aya).

Ugh, I liked Oxygen theme, but I don't like that blue background. I think I will search for antoher plasma theme...

Hans wrote:The reason it ignores you is probably because you still use Oxygen as your Plasma theme. Did you change theme (to (Custom) or something like that) after the panel modification?

Yeah, It changes to customized. If apply changes nothing happens, and when I open that dialog again my changes have vanished and oxygen it's again selected

Hans wrote:Finally, you can try this application that I just found. Not sure it works with the newer versions of Plasma though.

I haven't been able to make it work


Thansk anyway. I think I will look for another plama theme and forget about oxygen.

It is enough to change the wallpaper..the panel will change according to the tint of the wallpaper..

sathiskumarmsk wrote:It is enough to change the wallpaper..the panel will change according to the tint of the wallpaper..

At least not with the neon packages. I have set my wallpaper on the slideshow option, and the background of the panel doesn't change when the wallpaper does.

The KDE4 panel is designed to give true transparency. ie, not just draw the wallpaper but the windows that slide below it.
If you do not have a transparent panel, it is definitely a graphics driver issue. Refer to this thread if you have an nVidia GPU.

I filed a related bug on this yesterday, and it was closed as WONTFIX. Why? Because it's up to the theme authors as to which colors they want to use. It's not just the black background color on most of them, or the fact that plasma transparency doesn't work well on many video cards, it's the fact that they have hardcoded highlight colors. All default themes have blue highlight colors. But what if your KDE color scheme is Honeycomb? Then you have yellow highlights everywhere except on the panel which has blue highlights.

Why should plasma themes get to follow different rules than widget themes? Theme authors can do whatever they want, but the default themes included with KDE should follow the user selected color scheme.

I agree that users should be able to change the panel backgrounds. All this transparent grey on black backgrounds might look good in pictures but it gets a bit hard to use after a while. Too many men in black I guess.

The reason Plasma follows different rules to normal applications is because it is based on QGraphicsWidget while most Qt / KDE applications are based on QWidget.

QGraphicsWidget applications completely handle painting and therefore theming themselves, while Qt does it for QWidget applications unless the explicitly specify otherwise

The Plasma developers implemented a theming system themselves, and all of Plasma obeys that. If you want Plasma to use your system color theme, then wait for Aya to be updated to support theming the newly added features.

bcooksley wrote:The reason Plasma follows different rules to normal applications is because it is based on QGraphicsWidget while most Qt / KDE applications are based on QWidget.

Begging your moderator's pardon, but that's not a valid excuse. I am fully aware of the differences between QWidget::paintEvent() and QGraphicsItem::paint(), but Graphics View still has access to the palette, and should be using it. A different API is not an excuse to ignore accepted practice for using colors.

If I wrote a widget theme that had hardcoded black and blue colors, it would not be allowed in kdebase, and I would have to put it in kdeartwork.

Perhaps part of this discussion should be directed at the Plasma developers, who can in turn give an explanation.

Why starting such a technical discussion? The original poster did not want to know anything about transparency, nVidia cards, design philosophies nor Qt apis. I'll try to sum it up:

The only way to change the panel's background color is by changing the panel background option using the 'desktop theme details' section in the system settings program. And this thing is broken at the moment.

That's what he wanted to know. And I can confirm this bug, by the way.

The problem is, I would not call it a bug.