Attempting to customize the Manjaro Splash Screen

[betterBird]

Hello! I’m enjoying my time with Manjaro so far, but I did want to do some light customization without straying too far from the original design. I found a similar topic from about a year ago, saying that I could make my own splash screen by copying the Manjaro splash screen and making little tweaks to change the original wallpaper. Here is a link to it: Custom Manjaro-themed Plasma splashscreen - #3 by fasto

I followed along with these instructions, but when I selected the new splash screen in the system settings, it ignored all the customized files I had and played the original Manjaro splash screen. When I tried to see a preview of my splash screen, it also ignored my customized background image and QML file, playing the original Manjaro splash screen instead. Have there been any changes to KDE since then that might be causing this? Maybe there’s a certain script that runs when new themes are installed directly from the system settings?

[scotty65]

@betterBird

Have there been any changes to KDE since then that might be causing this?

Welcome to the Manjaro community @betterBird

Well, there was the change from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 about a year after that tutorial was written…

Having just looked in my ~/.local/share/plasma/look-and-feel/ directory at some Plasma 6 Splash screens I installed last year, it looks like the metadata.desktop file is no longer used, and it has been replaced by a metadata.json file:

/home/scotty/.local/share/plasma/look-and-feel/YaplassManjaro-Plasma6/metadata.json:

{
    "KPackageStructure": "Plasma/LookAndFeel/Splash",
    "KPlugin": {
        "Authors": [
            {
                "Email": "maire.nunez@gmail.com",
                "Name": "mrmaire"
            }
        ],
        "Category": "",
        "Description": "Yaplass(Yet Another Plasma6 Splashcreen) - Manjaro",
        "Id": "YaplassManjaro-Plasma6",
        "License": "GPLv3",
        "Name": "Yaplass Manjaro",
        "Website": ""
    },
    "Keywords": "Desktop;Workspace;Appearance;Look and Feel;Logout;Lock;Suspend;Shutdown;Hibernate;",
    "X-Plasma-APIVersion": "2"
}

[betterBird]

Thank you for the warm welcome!

I did notice the change from .desktop to .json, and i made sure to account for it. I also did my best to look over the other splash screens I downloaded and installed using the System Settings GUI, and tried to structure my customized splash screen in the same way. I haven’t had much luck so far, sadly.

I’ll keep working on it later, and I might try using a different splash screen as a base to build off of. Maybe I could send screenshots of my file structure, and copies of my metadata.json and the QML file later on? It might help us pinpoint the problem.

[scotty65]

@betterBird

I might try using a different splash screen as a base to build off of

That’s a good idea. Also, I just did a quick web search and found this tutorial (with plenty of screenshots), which may be helpful:

Plasma 6 - How to customise the splashscreen (a simple guide)

[betterBird]

Hello! Turns out there was one key detail I was missing. The Id of the theme in the metadata.json file must match the name of the folder you put the theme in. For example, if you name the theme’s folder “ManjaroGruvbox-Plasma6”, the Id must be the same in the metadata.json file. Thank you for your help!