Hi there,

as I'm having problems with the desktop effects right now, I've disabled them altogether.

I'm using the default Oxygen theme and when I disabled the desktop effects my Plasma panels turned from transparent to black, which looked really nice. However when I tried different themes and chose Oxygen again the panels were not black anymore but blue. Why is that?

Is the panel supposed to be black or blue in Oxygen? I prefer the black panels as it matches the desktop widgets' colour. How can I turn my panels black again?

TIA,
Blackhole

With desktop effects off the panel is blue, with them on it is black. If you want it black you will need to either have desktop effects on or find a theme with a black panel. You can create a custom theme with different parts of plasma using different themes, you can find that in the "Desktop Theme Details" part of System Settings.

No, that's not how it's behaving on my machine. With desktop effects on it's transparent, with desktop effect off it's opaque black and after some reboots and/or theme changing it's blue when selecting Oxygen again.

Check the screenshot:


So there definitely is a black panel WITHOUT desktop effects on my machine, but maybe that's just a bug. However I want the black panels back.

Does anybody know why the panel is blue anyway? Am I the only person that thinks that this looks ugly? I mean all the desktop plasma widgets have black borders only the panels are blue. That doesn't look nice. It's not consistent but just out of place. Why did the designers do that?

Does anybody know why the panel is blue anyway? Am I the only person that thinks that this looks ugly? I mean all the desktop plasma widgets have black borders only the panels are blue. That doesn't look nice. It's not consistent but just out of place. Why did the designers do that?

I have the same problem, but I don't care what the panel looks without effects, because I use them. Anyway, I think that it's a bug, and by the way. The black panel looks better.

Hm, yeah, I'd use the effects too, if I hadn't those problems.

Can anybody tell me whether there is a theme config file where I manually can set the panel colour for the oxygen theme?

The panel is an SVG file, which is controlled by the currently active theme in Plasma. Apart from creating your own theme, there is no way to change the Panel colour at this time.

bcooksley wrote:The panel is an SVG file, which is controlled by the currently active theme in Plasma. Apart from creating your own theme, there is no way to change the Panel colour at this time.

:'( And how would I create a new theme / modified Oxygen theme? Where's the SVG file located?

you can manage plasma themes in system settings /advanced /Desktop Themes Details.

Try this: copy /usr/share/apps/desktoptheme/default to .kde4/share/apps/desktoptheme in your /home folder (replace .kde4 with .kde if your distro is using .kde as the default $KDEHOME). Rename the folder from default to oxygen-black or something like this, then open it (oxygen-black in this example) and delete the opaque folder, then open metadata.desktop with kwrite, change Name=Oxygen to Name=Oxygen-black , save the file. Now select Oxygen-black from Appearance Settings. See if this works.

medo3891 wrote:Try this: copy /usr/share/apps/desktoptheme/default to .kde4/share/apps/desktoptheme in your /home folder (replace .kde4 with .kde if your distro is using .kde as the default $KDEHOME). Rename the folder from default to oxygen-black or something like this, then open it (oxygen-black in this example) and delete the opaque folder, then open metadata.desktop with kwrite, change Name=Oxygen to Name=Oxygen-black , save the file. Now select Oxygen-black from Appearance Settings. See if this works.

Shukran. I'll try that, but why would the panel be black just because I deleted the opaque folder?

The opaque folder contains a .svgz file that's used for the panel when desktop effects aren't activated. Look at the panel-background.svgz file in the opaque/widgets folder, you can open them with gimp or inkscape, or just turn on preview in konqueror or dolphin.

I had a similar problem, except the panel was blue and non-transparent even though I had effects on. It went away once I updated to 4.2.1. It didn't really bother me, though, because I don't like the solid black panel anyway.

Now that I think about it... Is it possible that the panel is influenced by the desktop background color? Try changing it from the default bluish color to black in Desktop Settings.

Alec wrote:Now that I think about it... Is it possible that the panel is influenced by the desktop background color? Try changing it from the default bluish color to black in Desktop Settings.

Already tried that. It doesn't have any effect. Like Medo said, the panel background is an svgz-file.

Come on guys, when you buy a blue car does it come with blue tires, seats and dashboard? Untill 4.2 you needed depression pills to use kde and now we've gone to a blue extreme which doesnt match anything but the air wallpaper.

Chrysalis wrote:Come on guys, when you buy a blue car does it come with blue tires, seats and dashboard? Untill 4.2 you needed depression pills to use kde and now we've gone to a blue extreme which doesnt match anything but the air wallpaper.

Exactly what I've been saying.