I have been working on a set of custom window decorations for quite a while now. I am very happy with how they look! Prior to plasma version 6.6, I didn’t have any issues following the developer docs for how to put an SVG theme together. Once I updated to 6.6 though, issues started popping up and they drove me insane for months.
However, I have recently narrowed down that the culprit is the Aurorae v2 renderer.
My issues include:
- Titlebar decorations for maximized windows rendering incorrectly, significantly reducing readability [this is because, for some unknowable reason, Aurorae v2 makes the decoration stretch to the full size of the window??? Allegedly it’s only for translucent decorations???]
- Toggle buttons not retaining a pressed state after pressing them [i.e. Keep Above]
- Various configuration parameters, such as animation time and text shadows, being entirely ignored and nonfunctional
- New to Plasma 6.7 is an odd visual bug where the center titlebar decoration erroneously shifts vertically a couple pixels when the window title changes- particularly noticeable in the settings program.
All of this leads me to a few questions:
- Is any of this behavior intentional?
- If so, why?
- If not, are there plans to work on these things?
Now, after digging around for months and finding that Aurorae v2 was the root of my issues, I also found a way to revert to v1 by manually editing the kwinrc file, and it works! Problem solved, right? Not even close actually. This method does not persist across a reboot, or even changing your window decorations. I wouldn’t be surprised if even so much as thinking about the settings program makes it revert to v2. Plasma is incredibly eager to force usage of the Aurorae v2 library on any theme you pick.
Or so I thought. It turns out KDE official themes like Breeze and Oxygen have their own specific libraries! But what I care about even more is that Plastik defaults to Aurorae v1. So, my ultimate question in this post is:
How do I make my theme do this? What kind of goofballery must I perform in the files to make Plasma stick to Aurorae v1 for my theme? It is clearly possible. And if it somehow isn’t, is there a way to just force Plasma itself to not use Aurorae v2?
It should be noted that my theme is SVG based- no QML or code of any kind.
Based on my experience, Aurorae v2 seems to have far too many issues with user made themes that worked perfectly fine on v1, to the point where I have questions about why it has even been pushed to the default and not an experimental option somewhere- especially since the Plasma default themes don’t seem to use normal Aurorae anymore. Even the KDE Developer documentation for making an Aurorae theme fails to mention that there are 2 different versions of Aurorae!!!
This has genuinely been driving me insane for months and I am desperate for a complete and working solution.
