This Week in Plasma: Fancy Time Zone Picker - KDE Blogs

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2025/01/25/this-week-in-plasma-fancy-time-zone-picker
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How does one use it in standalone form? I don’t see any option to do so:

That was one of the reasons I wanted 452240 – wayland: "No titlebar and frame" rule doesn't force SSDs on Wayland. fixed, so I’ll be glad to see it possible regardless of whether standard window decorations are visible. Does it apply to all plasmoids?

Has there been a change to the transparency/blurring of Plasmoids on the Desktop with Plasma 6.3?

Since 6.3 Beta 1, the backgrounds of the Plasmoids on the Desktop of all Plasma themes from the store look very bad. Only with the standard Breeze theme (light and dark) I can see that the transparency and also the blurring are ok.

I have not yet been able to find a bug entry for this.

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Right-clicking an empty area of the applications or process table in System Monitor no longer shows a context menu with no appropriate items in it. (Nate Graham, 6.3.0. Link)

Had to laugh so hard when seeing the screenshot of this bug :joy:

Comparing the 3 dark colors from that link, current and adwaita have the advantage of looking like having a subtle cloth (felt) underneath, while the new one is close to just plain black.

You gotta be careful with going darker, because apart from the aforementioned big aesthetic value, too dark (i.e. the contrast) hurts they eyes too and can make it be depressing as well, see the usual offenders vanilla Budgie, Zorin.

Fedora Budgie, too dark, too depressing. Don’t go that route. Plasma should remain slick.

I really like the darker Breeze theme!
I’d like to use this on my current Plasma 6.2 installation. Is it possible to download the updated color file (BreezeDark.colors from the merge request - I’m not allowed to post links yet) and put it somewhere in my home directory? If so, where?

To answer myself: It’s possible to just click on “Install from File…” in the colors KCM and pick the file from the merge request (I changed the name to “Breeze Darker” beforehand, so I don’t have to color themes with the same name). This puts it into ~/.local/share/color-schemes/.

It really looks quite nice!

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Dude… I was looking forward to a nice and calm weekend :melting_face:

Anyway, you all are Rockers & Rockets :ok_hand:

German version as always at s3nnet dot de

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@sepp, for future reference, linux - Where are the default `.colors` files stored in KDE Plasma 6? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange has the system defaults.

Add it as a standalone widget from the Widget Explorer, just like how you would add any other widget anywhere.

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How does one use it in standalone form? I don’t see any option to do so:

Right-click the panel, Add or Manage Widgets, choose Audio Volume.

What Nate is talking about is having the icon outside the system tray, not a standalone window.

But if you want a standalone window with those controls, you can just run kcmshell6 kcm_pulseaudio. It’s arranged a little differently, but has pretty much the same functionality.

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@cwo, thanks lots, but I know of that, and it’s not really a replacement. The plasmoids can be resized a lot smaller whilst displaying solely the information that matters.

Irrespective, it would have been useful for more plasmoids than merely this one. There’s an ongoing effort to port all plasmoid functionality to the KCMs, but until it’s complete, I would have liked to have been able to move them around like I can with a KCMShell-invoked KCM.

Related to this, is it possible to put a plasmoid in a window? It could be a nice GSOC if it isn’t.
Having an application that can load plasmoid would also mean you can use them on other desktops.

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Does plasmawindowed org.kde.plasma.volume do what you want?

also @santiago that’s the standard way of starting a plasmoid as its own window.

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@cwo, thank you – that’s perfect for me (although the padding’s gone, weirdly):

Is that the accelerator that was removed from the KRunner plugins list recently? A shame it’s so hidden.

Mystifying that plasmawindowed isn’t the default for a plasmoid attached to a panel. I can’t see why window decorations would be undesirable solely for those spawned by the shell.

@santiago, that’s exactly the idea I had about 8 months ago, too! I’m waiting to see whether phabricator.kde.org/T17396’s idea of documenting the process for using bindings in Python progresses, since I’d like to abstract as much as possible (instead of trying to wrangle together a cross-platform Qt + C++ toolchain).

Yes, the KRunner for plasmawindowed was dropped as part of Plasma 6.

Not sure about the padding, but it’s possible that the popup from the panel adds its own padding beyond that which the applet (or its fullRepresentation) has by itself.

Considering that the scrollbar is overdrawn, I think it’s moreso that plasmawindowed is getting rid of padding. I’ve drawn QtWidget scrollbars with PySide6 and PyQt6, and they didn’t require any additional padding from my side.

Hm, I can’t reproduce that, padding seems correct on the scroll bar here.

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@cwo, do you have a screenshot?

Environment

Operating System: Fedora Linux 41
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.10.0
Qt Version: 6.8.1
Kernel Version: 6.12.9-200.fc41.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 5700

Operating System: TUXEDO OS 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0
Qt Version: 6.8.1
Kernel Version: 6.11.0-108013-tuxedo (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
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