Hello,
I wonder how to completely remove global themes installed from System settings > Global Theme > Get New Global Themes … .
Please help.
Thank you.
AFAIK this also should be possible to do in Discover.
this did not work with the sweet theme
it left some of it’s files in both my icons and SDDM theme settings as well as several folders in ~/.local/share
perhaps this is just a badly behaved theme, but the task was complicated by these bits being left behind.
the easiest way to find them is to wait until discover tells you there is an add-on update so you can see the name, and then just type their name into krunner which will take you directly to the settings or folders where they live…
it’s also important to empty the trash can (if you use that) because discover will still pick up it’s existence and try to update it for you.
there really should be way to do this from discover since it’s telling you about the updates.
I don’t dare to try any themes since, just like for you, it infects my whole system with useless “Add-on” updates (even though “uninstalled”). Also, there seems to be no way to revert anything to the state you were just in (whether in themes or when accidentally making a horrible mess of the desktop in “edit mode”), which makes me feel extremely crippled and scared to try or do anything whatsoever. I’m seriously wondering what’s going on with all of this… It’s all broken.
Well, if you download and install the themes, icons, cursors, etc. manually in your /home/$USER/… you know where it all went and it should be easy (relatively speaking) to remove them again.
Disadvantage: generally more work and updates have to be downloaded and applied manually…
But “better” for the more complex, complete desktop themes in the long run IMHO (and this is quite the same how I would do it in e.g. Xfce…).
there is a plasma save utility out there that can restore a saved copy of all your desktop settings, but its no longer maintained and one time i really needed i ended up deleting my backup while trying to restore it because the UX is so bad.
i just use timeshift… that works every time.
The themes are not removed completely after pressing uninstall button in global themes menu and deleting files in ~/.local/share/plasma/look-and-feel/ also. Maybe someone knows how to completely remove installed themes without using timeshift?
I had to delete files in:
~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme
~/.local/share/color-schemes
i’ve not created a theme, but i imagine it’s very much up to the theme developer where they put stuff in ~/.local/share
badly behaved themes may not be fully reversible using the KDE install/remove functions which can leave detritus in your /home folder(partition).
removing these things is very much a manual process, as far as i can tell.
perhaps just keeping a back up copy of your ~/.local/share handy when you are trying out themes is a good practice.
Please tone it down and avoid spreading misery and negativity. By your own admission, you haven’t even used this feature. This isn’t a place to express negative feelings into the void.
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Sorry for not pretending that everything is working perfectly when everything actually is broken, I guess. But anything to not “be negative” and “spread misery” (??), I suppose.
I was under the naive impression that this is a help forum where you ask about problems you encounter and get help, but I mostly get ignored or insulted.
And I have no idea what “feature” you’re referring to which I “haven’t used”.
You’ve gotten lots of help with your questions. But then you turn around and insult the software and whine in public that its deficiencies cause you pain and stress, and then when called out on it, you play the victim and say you’re the one being insulted. It’s not appropriate behavior and you need to find a way to stop it or else you’re heading for a ban. Official warning.
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I’ve got some help here. Mostly (or at least a very high amount of) insults and snark. I’ve spent way more time and energy asking well-written questions than I have received useful or relevant solutions – that’s for sure.
Don’t know what you mean by “turn around”, and I don’t know how you could insult a software, but if you consider pointing out the slightest flaw (with the hope that it can be fixed or at least worked around, no less) to be “whining in public”, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe that’s why KDE appears to have stagnated with serious bugs never getting fixed; people are afraid to speak out due to the passive-aggressiveness from certain people. (Clearly this is not unique to Gnome, as I was led to believe.)
And yes, it does cause me very serious pain and stress when basic things are just hopelessly broken and I get insulted or ignored on top of it when trying to ask about these things. You want users to bottle it up and never point out any flaws or how these affect them? You really want a complete echo chamber of “positivity” (lies)?
What? Have you ever read your own messages, and others’ in my threads? It’s a lot of drivel and off-topic nonsense. Very insulting. Often not helpful. Why ignore all of that and single me out for “whining”?
You know what would make me (and others) not “whine”? If things worked correctly. How can you possibly have a forum for asking about issues if you can never point out issues? You want every thread to be blind praise to the awesomeness of KDE and its developers and how flawless their software is? Seriously, is this what you’re saying? I can’t believe that you would find anything I’ve written on this forum “inappropriate” in any way. These extremely high standards seem to be applied exclusively on me and nobody else, for unknown reasons.
What exactly have I done? Asked about a few things (very few compared to all the things I’ve worked around myself or found solutions for elsewhere) about KDE Plasma and KDE software? I spent the utmost effort asking each question, always going through and rewriting them before posting to remove any parts which, when read through with somebody else’s eyes, could possibly be interpreted as insulting. And even then, I get this. It’s maddening.
I’ve frankly had many more questions that I’ve wanted to ask, and even written up as drafts, but not dared to post, because of the reactions to the few threads I did start here (or lack of such). People (or at least one person) are literally afraid of interacting with this community. That cannot be a good sign.
Since I haven’t done anything wrong, and especially not intended to do so, threats of getting banned entirely is the worst insult of all. You clearly have some sort of issue with me personally, for whatever reason. Maybe you think I’ve been here before under a different username/identity. It’s not the case. I actually haven’t used KDE (before recently) since ~2001, when I barely knew what it even was. And I didn’t interact with any community back then (just tried out Linux). Today, it’s way more serious, with Windows having become unusable and XFCE turning out to be so unstable and buggy that it cannot be used to power my Linux system. It’s thus KDE or Gnome (realistically, since the others are much smaller and worse supported projects), and I picked KDE due to Gnome’s horrible reputation of rude and condescending developers.
Yet now a KDE developer is going to ban me from asking well-written, polite (IMO) questions about KDE, not having knowingly done one “bad” thing. It’s like a cruel joke.
I really urge not just you, but this entire communtiy, to reconsider how you treat people asking for help and about very serious and annoying bugs. The impression I’ve got from you is that you either shrug it off as “no big deal”, or feel personally attacked because somebody “from the outside” dares point out that your KDE isn’t flawless in every little detail. If you take an earnest look at the things I’ve posted here, you cannot possibly and honestly say that I’ve been insulting or rude toward anyone. And if such appears to be the case, make sure to read the reply to which I was responding, as it’s more than likely off-topic and unhelpful (assuming it hasn’t been deleted).
@ExXfceUser Sir, I understand that you might have issues that we do not see, but you are what one person called a “help vampire” and every day, you go from one disaster to the next. As I said in another thread, I hope you find whatever it is you need to make your system work perfectly, but I seriously doubt that any computer system on earth can do what you want. XFCE couldn’t live up to your standards and now it is looking like KDE Plasma won’t either.
For most of us, Plasma is flawless. but you say “everything is broken.” When you downloaded your distro install ISO, did you verify the checksum?
Curious question: When you switch to GNOME, will you create your account over there with the name ExPlasmaUser?
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boy howdy has this thread gone off topic.
yes, plasma themes created by 3rd parties outside the control of the KDE team can potentially leave behind folders even after they are uninstalled from the global themes settings page.
i don’t know how to solve that other than reading the reviews for 3rd party themes before you install them… but the sweet theme is one of the top rated themes and it was the one that left behind the most detritus in my experience so far (which is minimal because i mostly just use breeze).
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@ExXfceUser the root of your problem is that you want total control over your system, but you’re unwilling or unable to do the one thing that would actually achieve it: write your own OS and DE. That is truly the only way to get what you want. Modifying an existing one as you have tried to do with XFCE and are now trying to do with Plasma will not work, because every existing system bakes in certain assumptions about how the user is going to use the system based on its history and target userbase–assumptions that as we can see, are often not true for you personally.
So you find yourself chafing against these assumptions and looking for workarounds. And as we’ve detected from reading all your posts, often your workarounds themselves cause other problems that you have to find further workarounds for. So your whole system ends up as an impressive tower of workarounds that threatens to fall apart at any moment, which you correctly deduce is really fragile and this causes you stress.
This is very unusual behavior. I regularly perform user support, pay attention to KDE’s 100k user subreddit, and I triage all bug reports for Plasma. Literally thousands a year. So I feel like I have a pretty good impression of what our users do with their systems. Believe me when I say that I have never encountered someone who is so picky and demands so much from their system. I know you don’t want to believe that you’re a super extreme outlier, but it’s the truth. The fact that you interpret bewilderment at what you’re trying to do as an unwillingness to accept criticism is quite telling.
Our system can’t handle what you want to do with it. You aren’t going to succeed at breaking this cycle with Plasma, or any other pre-made system. You need to make it yourself if you want satisfaction.
If you don’t have the technical ability or time to do so, then you need to accept that some things won’t work 100% exactly the way you want, or else you’ll continue to be miserable and bang your head against digital brick wall after brick wall.
4 Likes
So sorry for having the audacity to use your forum for its intended purpose.
This is simply false. I’ve avoided even loading this forum many days at a time because of your treatment. So it’s not “every day”, and it’s not “one disaster to the next”. (What?)
Again just nonsense. If it were flawless, you would not need this forum nor would you ever need to touch the source code again. Stop this “being silly” (as you call it).
It’s painfully clear by now that you are a troll. Do not ever respond with your rude insults to any of my questions.
Prediction: you won’t get so much as a warning in spite of openly posting rude insults. It doesn’t matter what is posted, but who posts it. You are clearly one of the “protected” members of this forum.
This reply would make sense if I had been somebody who had asked hundreds of questions about heavily customizing the GUI in a pixel-perfect manner, but that’s not the case. My posted issues have been quite “general” and I dropped any idea of using special themes early on, before ever coming here for help. With KDE Plasma, I simply wanted a stable GUI to contrast the extremely unstable and glitchy XFCE. And KDE Plasma doesn’t crash on me, so I haven’t claimed that it does. But it has numerous “minor” yet very serious glitches, of which I’ve only asked about a few. I can’t see how this makes me into some “extreme” user with unrealistic and unusual demands. It’s possible that reinstalling a clean Debian with KDE right away might somehow fix certain things, but I don’t really see why that would be. I will certainly try that, most likely with the next major release.
Everything we’re talking about is mostly volunteer, or very lightly-sponsored, projects. Everything we’re talking about also mostly works for most users - otherwise Google results would be filled with answers to your questions already. Nothing is perfect - but an open-source community can build toward really great solutions by either coming together around a common project, or by being frustrated by limitations and forking/building from scratch some new innovation.
I can understand how if you see things such as being unable to stop yourself from clicking a specific context menu item on the trash can, not using the built-in Autostart feature because you need to use a specific script to mount certain drives and launch very specific applications in a certain order, and calling the inability to toggle full-screen mode in an image viewer with specifically the middle mouse button “crippling” as being relevant to a broad user base and being of high severity to that user base, then you’d feel that others should have a sense of urgency about them…but they’re just not common/general concerns, and the constant catastrophizing language wouldn’t be helpful either way - for you, or for folks trying to help you.
I like my set ways as much as anyone, but I’m sorry, feeling “completely crippl[ed]” by a disruption in hotkey functions for a specific one of multiple background audio applications just isn’t healthy. But regardless, if these issues are catastrophic to your personal state, then I would encourage you to leverage that into building something new and better. Or encourage whoever is paying you to run those intricate sequences of scripts and programs to sponsor work that would make your job easier!
Also, I lied before about being done saying this - switch from Debian KDE, otherwise you will be stuck on outdated versions of high-velocity software for years 
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After trying few I could not find better looking, neutral, “not in your face” theme than a Breeze dark KDE theme. It seems to me that it is not a very big deal if a theme leaves residue after an uninstall. It is possible to find mostly all files and remove them manually, it just takes time and root privileges.
I just wanted to say that KDE is really great OS. It got a lot better than it was a few years ago. I really like to be able to set any programs to open in “no title bar and frame” option - it is saving screen space and that is just amazing. The most terrible thing in GNOME for me is that topbar thing that even apple os have an option to autohide. GNOME do not save screen space KDE do!