Can someone please recommend a Plasma theme with transparent blurry widgets

General
1

I would love to see my background (blurred) behind the many widgets I have on my desktop, but I can’t find a good quality Plasma style that works for me, and I would love to hear some recommendations!

I’m using Twilight Breeze - light window colors with the Breeze Dark Plasma theme - so I’d like something that is a bit dark, but not totally black: I’ve seem some totally black themes that are pretty nice, but I can’t deal with the lack of contrast. Air has a nice transparency, but - it is light colored, not transparent enough, and AFAIK about to be removed in Plasma 6 anyway.

Your recommendations will be highly appreciated!

2

Well, someone might recommend you something but there’s a good chance you won’t like it. What you want to do is have a background svg in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/whatever/widgets and edit it to your personal likings in Inkscape or something. If you don’t have such a file, I suggest you download a plasma theme that does and copy it in your current plasma theme to edit. For example:

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3

@dzon - interesting. I was somewhat aware of Plasma styles made up of SVGs, but it doesn’t look straight forward - there’s a bit to learn about mangling the Plasma style SVG. I might play with it, but I don’t really trust my abilities on this front.

Also - can you apply blur with just the SVG file, or do you need something else? Is there documentation of how to create Plasma styles?

4

Yeah, you should find some doc on how to do plasma themes. And yes, you can define a certain blur on a svg file in Inkscape. Overall the blur depends on your overall settings in system settings.
Pick an easy one to start with. In the example I used the relax plasma theme. I believe it’s this one https://store.kde.org/p/1687614 It has an “easy” background svg. Open that in Inkscape, do your adjustments, save, change to some other plasma theme and change back. Something like:

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5

Takes a bit of fiddling to do an entire plasma theme ( depends what exactly you want of course, how…um…elaborated so to speak). But in terms of the widget background, that’s the way to go.

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6

Try the “willow dark plasma 6” window decoration, they have a nice blurred window

7

@NazrinFanClub , thank you but I’m looking for a widget theme, not at windows decoration.

8

I’m not quite sure what you are trying to do, but I’ve been accused of doing some pretty awful things to Plasma 6 over the last dew months.

This is probably the opposite of what you want though:

I should add a disclaimer. I don;t actually create this mess., I just mess with hte mess that cleverer brains than mine make :grin:

9

A. that’s pretty nice.
B. the transparent areas in the windows aren’t blurring the background. I believe this is a problem with the kwin blurring API - it will not apply blur to transparent areas unless the application asks for that somehow (like Konsole does when you set it in the profile appearance) and if you apply a transparent theme to an application that normally isn’t transparent - it will not know to ask for that.
C. The Plasma style that is used in the panel looks semi-transparent? Can you please let me know the name of the Plasma style you use there?

10

The windows aren’t blurred because it’s a kvantum theme. At least, I think. Kvantum seems to have a prob in 6. If you want some transparent with blur in windows, I suggest you use Lightly. But again, if you’re looking for a plasma theme and you don’t want to mess with the svg’s, I suggest you look for one that is transparent AND follows the colorscheme.

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11

“[dzon]
The windows aren’t blurred because it’s a kvantum theme. At least, I think. Kvantum seems to have a prob in 6. . .”

That’s pretty well correct. The transparency in my Qt Apps is created by using a Kvantum Theme (I mostly use a modified version of a Theme called KV Curves 3D) and there is blurring applied. I’ve just never seen the ‘Blur’ eddect in Plasma Settigns work with either V5.x OR V6.
I just set it out of habit.

Starting with the Panel.
That screenshot was of Plasma 6 (Neon 6) in the X11 desktop. Just because there are some things in Wayland that still don;t play nice with my antique system.

The Panel doesn;t have much that can be changed under Opacity. You get 3 choices.
Adaptive
Opaque
Translucent

Translucent ‘wasn’t’. It was not Opaque, but it was not very Translucent either. In Plasma 5 there was a little widget you could add that allowed a modicum of translucency ‘level’ but I couldn’t find one for Plasma 6.

A bit of experimentations (well, a ‘LOT’ of experimentation) got me a slightly less dark and nicely blurred looking panel that shows a hint of the background as I scroll from Activity to Activity and lets it show the different wallpaper colours through.

To save some trial and error and maybe give a ‘starting point’ to play with, I’ll put ‘my’ Settings choices below.

My Appearance and Style settings are:
Global Theme:
Breeze-Dark

Colors:
Kvantum

Application Style:
Kvantum-Dark

Plasma Style:
ChromeOsKDE
Follows color scheme

  • NOTE - the ‘ChromeOsKDE’ style is the one that makes the Panel look more transparent than the ordinary ‘Adaptive’ Opacity setting under ‘Enter Edit Mode’.
    It is not in Settigns by Default.
    You have to Search and Download it in the Plasma Styles tab using the little button that says ‘Get New’ - which is usually right next to ‘Install from file’.

Window Decorations:
Utterly-Round-Dark

  • I use this because the Title bar is Blurred and Translucent, and because I like the good sized ‘Coloured’ Buttons on the Title bar (I hate those almost invisible things . . )
    It is another thing that is NOT in Default and has to be downloaded - The trouble is, I just looked and I cannot see ‘where’ I downloaded them. They ARE in there - I’ve just lost the spot (and the plot apparently)

OK !!! - Making the window that System Settings opens in bigger Horizontally - shows the ‘Get New’ button I was looking for !! Stupid RossD

Icons:
Oxylite PNG Icons
There are so many sets that can be downloaded in there that you can find just about anything that you like.
A WARNING though. Some of the fancier ones are updated daily. I think it is to gather ‘Likes’ or rankings.
So don;t download more than one or two or you will find Discover bogging down for hours.

Cursors:
Same thing applies.

That’s about it really. Kvantum for Theming Qt Apps with Translucent bits.
And Plasma Style ‘ChromeOsKDE’
to make the Panel look a bit more Transparent.

Sorry this is so long. It might help people who like to play with Plasma’s Appearance a bit more.

12

kwin-effects-forceblur can do that in Plasma 6, it’s a modification of the default Blur Desktop Effect to force to blur to specific windows like the KWin Script kwin-forceblur did for Plasma 5 / X11.

Example with Firefox + WaveFox CSS + kwin-effects-forceblur:

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