Will KDE 6 Impact Global Themes?

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Hi, I’m new to KDE and am interested in trying to learn how to design and develop a global theme in KDE. There appear to be very good resources for how to make them, but as the ones I found are all for KDE Plasma 5 with it including mention of Plasma Desktop Scripting. I’m curious if there should be an expectation of needing to redo much with KDE Plasma 6 in which case I might want to wait until KDE Plasma 6 is further along in development.

Sorry for the question if it’s obvious I’m still somewhat new to Linux.

Thank you for your time.

resources referenced
Explanation for creating global theme
Overarching theme and plugin wiki page

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It’s a good question.

Plasma 6 will require some changes, but not generally to the theme assets themselves, just the metadata (i.e. use a JSON file instead of a .desktop file). There will be a porting guide before the launch of Plasma 6.

Actually, @alex do we have one already somewhere?

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I have added porting guides in a few places (like plasmoids and systemmonitor plugins).

Do we even have some generic global theme documentation that explains it’s metadata?

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I hope those guides are meant for the developers of the various items and not the enduser.

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@alex We have some things at Plasma Themes and Plugins | Developer. There’s also a porting guide for widgets which can be found at Porting Plasmoids to KF6 | Developer.

@locutus they are.

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Though that is not related to the metadata.desktop porting. In Setup | Developer is a note on how to port it. Also, the porting can be done for KF5 too. This even brings performance benefits.

I also looked at Plasma Themes and Plugins | Developer, but did not find any references to the metadata format. Did I miss sth?

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Yeah I don’t of a “.desktop to JSON” porting guide. If we don’t have one, it would probably be good to write it.

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Okay, thank you for the information.

I’ll probably try to start learning how to make them after I fix a graphical glitch problem that makes only one screen usable.

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There’s some mention of metadata.{json,desktop} in Understanding Plasma Styles | Developer.

The solution I attempted there was to still show how a metadata.desktop file would look like, while displaying the metadata.json as the up-to-date way.

About the Global Theme tutorial, the following task is available:

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