I installed Debian 12.8 with KDE a few days ago, and last night I was trying out various desktop customizations – and somehow got a setting that gives buttons on Oxygen Theme with Breeze Dark style and Breeze Classic color scheme a neon green or neon orange shadow. It’s quite jarring against the restful warm gray of the task bar or lock screen, and I can’t seem to find a way to get that shadow back to a variation of the button or background color. How can I at least restore the complete default theme and color scheme?
if going to the global theme and reapplying the default breeze theme does not fully restore everything, then one of those themes you were trying has left something behind as they are not always good at cleaning up after themselves.
from my notes:
## THEMES AND COLORS ##
#a global theme can add items to these settings, but may not remove them all upon uninstall
- Appearance > Global Theme
- Appearance > Plasma Style
- Appearance > Colors
- Appearance > Windows Decorations
- Appearance > Icons
- Appearance > Cursors
- Appearance > Splash Screen
- Startup and Shutdown > SDDM
#need to manually check each settings page, select the red trash can(s) and hit apply
I had already checked all of those pages, but none of mine have a red trash can (or any other color). I’m on Plasma 5; is that a Plasma 6 thing?
Have you look into the cache ~/.cache. You can either clear that folder or look for items belonging to that particular theme.
SImply emptying the cache could solve your problem.
You could … close SystemSettings. Rename ~/.config/kdeglobals. Restart SystemSettings.
And welcome to KDE Discuss.
Clearing the entire ~/.cache folder seems extreme – I’ve got a couple dozen folders inside there. I just emptied the plasmashell folder, figuring that was unlikely to mangle anything else, and that doesn’t seem to have changed anything.
I found ~/.config/kdedefaults/kdeglobals and renamed that; opening System Setting created a new one (reasonable to expect), selecting the global Breeze Twilight didn’t get rid of the neon shadows. 
it does no harm to delete the then entire ~/.cache folder
it will be recreated as soon as you start using things again… but sometimes things don’t get deleted from there like they should and so they can stick around like that last guest at a party that just won’t go home.
Okay, I dumped the entire contents of ~/.cache (two folders recreated before I could even close Dolphin).
No change with the neon shadows.
you may just have to resort to editing them yourself… almost every part of the UI is configurable, i imagine the shadows are too.
i assume you’ve tried making a new user acct to see if the issue persists?
if not then you can always try this brute force method of finding the issue
#brute force troubleshooting...
mv ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
#logout and log back in again to force plasma to recreate the folder with default settings
dolphin --split ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
#copy back half of the BORKED folder contents at a time and relog to see if issue returns
#if it does, then delete the folder again, relog, and only copy half of that previous half
#repeat until the culprit is found, then finally, copy back everything BUT that culprit bit
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@SilentObserver Actually it’s not that extreme. You clear the cache to clear the last settings. As soon as you run you system again, the cache will repopulate.
Today and possibly tomorrow logging out, restarting, and creating a new user account are contraindicated for me because I got myself locked out of Skype and until Microsoft gets around to deciding if I gave enough information to recover my Microsoft account I don’t want to close the one open instance of Skype I still have.
I would welcome information on what file contains the individual elements of the KDE UI, however, so I can dig in that. As noted, the colors of each element are configurable (that’s part of creating a new Theme), and in Plasma 4 were user accessible (I could change scroll bar width, window border width, individual window element colors, etc.) – but Plasma 5 appears to have hidden most of those from the UI settings applet.
Okay, got the Skype issue straightened out, and discovered some other problems were due to Wayland still not liking the available nVidia driver (seems to work and then stuff starts not working right) so I’m back on X11 – but I still have the neon shadows (green/aqua on the task bar, orange/cerise on the screen unlocker).
I’ve been through every location I can find KDE hidden folders, and I don’t see anything making any change. I did previously wipe the entire ~/.config folder, without any change. Let me try your brute force method for a bit…
Very first time I relogged with the entirely new ~/.config, I still had the neon shadows (and my wallpapers, icon layouts, etc. were, of course, totally hosed). I put the “borked” one back and all is back as it was; apparently I’m just stuck with neon shadows on certain objects.
you could try going into settings > colors & themes > window decorations
find the theme you are using (should have a bright boarder around it 
and click on the pencil icon… there should be a tab in there for shadow you can mess with.
if you want to know what files were just changed you can run this in a terminal to see the 10 most recently changed files.
find -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -10
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Good thought, I’d missed the pencil icons (whatever happened to text clues?), but they don’t have anything with the colors I’m seeing on those particular shadows in either taskbar icons or unlock screen selections.
I don’t think the 10 most recently changed files will help here, either, since this has now been going on for three days.
I’m wondering if I could just reinstall KDE – sudo apt install --reinstall kde-plasma-desktop – and get restored defaults?
apt reinstall will only affect the package and dependencies… it will not over write what you have in your home folder.
to force that you would need to uninstall and purge then reinstall… and you would need to do that from a tty terminal, i would think
Oxygen theme. Breeze Dark style. Breeze classic color scheme. Myeah, something’s off there. It could be helpfull to post what application style, what window decoration and what plasma theme you’re actually using.
Colour schemes you created will be in ~/.local/share/color-schemes/. Just delete any *.colors files in there and they will be gone and you will be using the color schemes installed by your distro.
Those are in a place like (it varies by distro) /usr/share/color-schemes/ and you should not edit those. Reinstalling your distro’s KDE packages will replace them.
Hope that helps.
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Application style is Fusion, Plasma style is Breeze Dark, and window decorations are Breeze. I initially tried several others (including downloading a couple through the System Settings provided “get new”, trying to get a light scheme for my working windows but a dark (gray or muted color) for the task bar, one of them (I don’t recall which) generated the neon shadows and didn’t clean them up when I switched back to something sane.
I trashed everything in ~/.local/share/color-schemes and relogged – and no change. I think the next thing is going to be purging and reinstalling the KDE package. I have a second computer so I can follow along on CLI installation instructions, and it’s just a couple commands (and some waiting) since I already have all the repositories in place.
Oh, it just occurred to me, I could boot from a Debian KDE Live and copy its color schemes to my /usr/share/color-schemes to restore absolute defaults. No terminal commands or worry about Synaptic pulling out other things that depend on task-kde-desktop metapackage contents. Let me try that first…
Edit: and that changed nothing. 