I’m reaching out because I’m experiencing a persistent issue with KWin desktop effects since updating to version 26.04. Specifically, I’m having trouble with Transparency and Wobbly Windows.
Even though I disable these effects in the System Settings, one of them always re-enables itself automatically after every reboot.
I’ve looked through previous threads regarding similar bugs, but none of the suggested fixes have worked for me so far. I tried disabling them via terminal commands, but the change only lasts for the current session and doesn’t persist after a restart.
While I know I could potentially write a script to disable them at login, that feels like a “dirty” workaround rather than a proper fix.
Does anyone know if there is a permanent solution for this, or is it a known regression that I’ll just have to wait for a future update to fix?
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Same question I asked at the other link. Is there a known fix, did it work for you, and do you know why the upgrade broke it? Were you also upgrading Kubuntu from 25.10 to 26.04?
I’m asking because I have only 46 days till Kubuntu 25.10 goes out of support, and translucent windows sounds like the kind of effect that I would hate so much that I’d switch to a new linux distro/desktop manager to get rid of it.
(Of course I’ve never seen kde’s “translucent windows”, to know how hard it makes it to read and use one’s topmost windows. It could range from annoying-and-ugly to can’t-see-clearly-enough-to-turn-off-the-misfeature. But I’m presuming enough bleedthrough to force me to use kde as if it were a tiling window manager, never stacking windows at all.)
Aha. Happening only when moving a window is not anywhere near as bad as I feared.
Thank you.
FWIW, I have encountered bleed-through as an aesthetic choice, and I believe the term used there was also “translucency”. This was, IIRC, on MacOS - in shell windows, of all things.
I detest new/cool features that are added which developers somehow think it being a great idea to enable by default. All UIs should always start out minimal, only opt-in on these.
That rant aside, run this to fix it more permanently:
To be fair, it’s not something that’s enabled on the KDE side, it’s a choice of the downstream distribution. Both of these effect are off by default in upstream Plasma.
