I’ve been excited for Plasma 5.25 to reach the Manjaro KDE stable branch ever since it was unveiled but now that it’s here, I notice some differences from how it behaves on KDE Neon that bother me.
On Neon, when I set a custom color scheme that tints windows with the accent color, inactive windows keep the tint as they should:
This is with identical color scheme settings between the two.
In addition, there is this visual glitch that I hoped would be ironed out by 5.25 but is still here — when switching between windows, on the one that becomes inactive, the titlebar and the toolbar change to their inactive color with just enough milliseconds of a delay between the two to be noticeable every time, and that bugs me to no end:
I’ve looked as best as I could through the available KDE settings under Appearance with no luck. Any suggestions as to whether and how this behavior can be modified are welcome.
… to /etc/environment. You’ll have to log out and back in for it to take effect.
Plasma 5.25 is full of bugs and should not have been pushed out into the Stable branch. 5.24 is a long-term support release and was quite mature. 5.25 should have remained in the Testing branch until it too was sufficiently mature.
In 5.25, the KDE developers have unfortunately adopted an alpha-release quality by rewriting significant parts of the desktop and releasing them right away — a habit that, it must be said, the KDE developers are well known for.
Well, 5.25.5 is the last point release of the 5.25 series, so it won’t get more mature at all.
By this logic, 5.25 series should have been skipped all together, just for a change of 5.26 (which is very new) to be more mature than a release that’s gotten bugfixes for months?
I have not had any issues with 5.25 (that I know of), so I can’t relate to all the “5.25 is soooo buggy” posts from this last stable update. I use 5.25.5 with Wayland on AMD GPU.
Looks like you are correct. My assumption that the difference originated in Manjaro was because I was comparing with a KDE Neon image from right after they unveiled Plasma 5.25, but I downloaded a fresh Neon image built today and, what do you know, the behavior I described comes from upstream.
For those curious, here’s how to retrace my steps: in System Settings, under Appearance > Color, I set an accent color, then cloned the Breeze Light scheme and just enabled these three, leaving everything else at the default:
The problem that arises is that Apply accent color to inactive window titlebars seems to have stopped working somewhere between Plasma 5.25.0 and 5.25.5.
Here’s how it behaves in 5.25.0:
And here’s 5.25.5:
Anyway. I’ll report this to KDE. Thank you to everyone who replied to this topic, and apologies for wasting your time.
It’s annoying - I jumped to unstable and testing to check this feature out. The problem is that (as has been the case in the past with people creating themes like Cullax) VERY frequently with wallpaper slideshows, the colours selected by Plasma just end up not working… Not at all.
Here’s one example - where I get a good result by selecting a suitable highlight, impossible for the OS to do reliably without any real awareness.
This works because 1. It’s ONLY applying the highlight (it fails when the windows start to get tinted) and 2. Possibly because I prefer colourless grey base themes.
I’m sure the story would be very different with bright/light themes.
But when you get bored with the labor intensive approach (not too bad if you have kcmshell5 kcm_colors as the last command in your krunner) then just go back to a sensible theme option, seems to work with just about all wallpapers:
I think that Windows has a better approach to this - there needs to be some control over what wallpapers are associated with different tints.
Maybe when the wallpaper changes, we should have a shortcut in the panel to click and choose a colour which then needs to be remembered - perhaps writing a tag in the wallpaper file.
Hmmm that’s not a bad idea, maybe I’d better go put a suggestion…
Hmmm certainly there are many bugs occurring - though many are NOT plasma bugs per se…
I just spent an hour fixing mine… the accent colours were not switching properly in Dolphin, and other weird stuff has been going on with no relevant log information.
So I renamed .config and put stuff back, carefully testing with kwin_x11 --replace and plasmashell --replace and adding frequent logout/login cycles.
Having Konsave is nice - as you can regularly save configs after each step and go back at each step.
Needless to say, configs from previously good desktops are what caused the issue. Now I replaced 99% of the .config folder and set the rest up I have restored 1. Transparent sidepanel in Dolphin (Looks ok - but usually set at 95% I am not sure when it stopped working…) and 2. correct tinting (though it’s still very hit and miss - at least it’s being applied now).
I think KDE is struggling with it’s lack of rigidity more than anything.
@Strit has no issues - but then I am confident that his desktop has strayed rather less from the default than mine has.
Very often, there are bugs arising (which shouldn’t really arise) which are caused by the user configs…
This is fairly true. My desktop is rather “vanilla”. I do have a fair amount of plasma widgets on the desktop, with graphs and numbers. But otherwise, I don’t do anything fancy.
