Theming KDE Plasma - The KDE Experiment - Part 5
4841 - Your options
KDE Plasma can be tweaked in any number of ways. From the desktop layout with widgets, to the colors, the look and feel, and the themes, you can pretty much do anything you like to make your desktop behave how you want it. So what can you change ?
Plasma lets you change the look of the desktop in one click with the "Look and feel" option. By default, you'll get a Breeze and Breeze dark option, but you can download new looks and apply them in one click from the settings.
Yiu can then change any part of the desktop look individually: desktop theme, which will change the widgets look, cursor theme, for that mouse cursor, and splash screen, for that loading screen you'll barely see when starting your session.
2 - Desktop theme
This is how your widgets will look. By default, you'll be using the breeze theme, but there are plenty of other options available. To get more, click on "get new themes", and you'll be able to preview and download any number of themes to change how your widgets look. My favorite is the Oxygen theme of old, with nice clean black background and white edges, but you can go crazy and install anything.
3 - Cursor theme
This is the look of your mouse cursor, from the standard arrow to the animation when loading stuff, or the little hand to click links. There again, a "get new themes" button allows you to one-click install new mouse themes and apply them on the fly. There are even some left handed variants for you to download. Select the one you want, click apply, and you're good to go !
4 - Splash screen
This is the screen that pop up when you login into your session. Not much incentive to tweak this one, but there are plenty to choose from the "get new them" button
5 - Icons
This one is available from the main settings menu. Once again, the "get new themes" is your friend, and will let you download icon themes very quickly. Some icons will allow you to select from multiple install files, it is generally a good practice to pick up the latest version available.
5 - Application style
This is how your apps will look ! By default, you'll be using the Breeze theme, which is KDE's default. It does look a bit dated in my opinion, with buttons sporting drop shadows. You can configure Breeze here, with a lot of options, such as centering tabs, drawing toolbars separators or not, enabling animations, configuring scrollbar buttons, or tweaking menu transparency.
TO get new themes, there are no "get new themes button" here. I found, one one of the viewer's advice, the plasma-oxygen-theme, which is excellent and what I was looking for all along ! You can install it from the terminal, with
sudo apt install plasma-theme-oxygen
There are a few others, but you'll have to look quite a bit to find them. Some examples include Virtuality, a modern, flat, black and white theme, or the StyleProject, which can be tweaked to look like anything. These themes must be compiled, so they are not that easy to install, but if you follow the instructions, and know which packages to install to get them to compile, you could get some nice results !
6 - Window decorations
These are the windows titlebars and frames. Here, you can find a lot of options as well, with the return of my beloved get new decorations button. Some might not work here as well, maybe because they are made for an older version of KDE plasma. THe one I found were prone to bugs, with buttons sticking out of the title bar. You can also configure each of these themes, with button sizes, border sizes, and the button positioning. I like my window controls on the left, so I moved them all here.
7 - GTK styles
YOu can of course run GTK apps in KDE Plasma. By default, they'll pick up the default Breeze look, but you can tweak that if you'd like, with the choice of a GTK 2 theme for older apps, and GTK 3 for more modern GNOME applications. YOu can choose icon themes and cursor themes as well for these applications, and configure their look. Oh, and, of course, the get new themes button is here too, to download some new ones !
8 - Colors
KDE Plasma ships with a lot of color schemes by default, which you can can tweak on the fly, and, you guessed it, get new color schemes at the press of a button ! It changes the colors of the selected items, links, buttons, window decorations, and more ! YOu can edit a scheme and save it as well.
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Also Watch my Experience with Manjaro Budgie on a Full AMD Linux Build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZdj4Q08fBg
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