I have been unable to get custom global themes (installed with the “Get New Global Themes…” button) to work completely. I have tried with two new clean installs of minimal KDE on two different machines.
So far I have tried Sweet KDE (without kvantum) as well as Layan (with kvantum).
Sweet KDE was missing lots of icons and other issues where the theme didn’t match the screenshot, as well as missing the dock at the bottom of the screen. However the login screen looked normal as well as the top of screen menu
Layan seemed to have all of its icons and a normal login screen but is again missing the dock. Top of screen menu looks okay.
Before anyone asks, yes I did log out and in after installing these themes and I also did check the “Use desktop layout from theme” checkbox when applying the global theme.
I figured I’d post this thread before trying a normal KDE install so that it might be found by future users.
Make sure then. Files from the KDE Store are just files provided by the community, personally I wouldn’t use these “Get new something something” button in KDE. Look for and download, and install locally in your user folder, your customizations, this way you know what you download, can make sure it is maintained, compatible, and don’t have weird issues from installing broken stuff because you clicked clicked on whatever.
Also check official page of each ‘thing’ you want to install, some things may require extra steps, or other things.
Thanks for you suggestions. I already tried installing in an alternative way, ie not using that button, by using the Pling store for the a kvantum theme. These are easy to download and show up as kvantum themes in pling store and are added to kvantum easily. I have double-checked the pages of themes on pling, and the only additional instructions they provide either sum up to “please use the kvantum theme for a better experience” or provide recommended settings for the kvantum theme.
Thanks for sanity checking me but as I’ve now tried multiple themes I am pretty confident I am doing everything right, yet still don’t get the expected result…
But also, is what you expect, the actual result you should expect? You’re talking about the panel/dock, I don’t see any reference to the panel/dock in Sweet KDE page. Same for its icon you say it is missing icons? which one, did you verify the theme actually has these icons?
I mean you maybe think some things are broken, but they may just not exist in what you install.
Hi, so this is what I see after installing Sweet Mars KDE global theme. I may have installed it incorrectly before as it looks like all icons are there! Previously the System Settings icon, among some others, was missing. However the login screen looks okay.
As you can see it just gets rid of any background image (although the transparency on dolphin does seem to work). The key thing is that the bottom panel is not a dock as shown in the second screenshot on pling–instead we just have a normal KDE panel with some new icons and no top bar at all (where my system tray should be).
I installed it with kvantum but for some reason there’s not an option to select it in my global themes, which I thought is suppose to be the case, so I ended up having to install this one with the button
I feel like I’m going crazy here but thanks for your persistent replies in this thread, much appreciated!
If you want a dock, you should install Latte dock or some other such dock-type extension. Otherwise - modify your panel to resemble a dock.
A global theme will not install a dock for you, and if it tried to, I would worry about it.
Lastly, why should your system tray be at the top? I think a normal minimal-install would put the panel with the taskbar at the bottom.
Again, as someone upthread mentioned - what exactly are you downloading and do you need additional things to make it look like the screenshots you saw when you downloaded it?
This is no Manjaro problem. Download of Global Themes and other theming parts is broken on all KDE distros. It’s a problem of the underlying Pling server.
I expected the theme to come with a dock as that is what’s shown in the screenshots on its pling page (which I previously linked). In addition, I expect the tray at the top as that is what’s show in the screenshots at that link.
I don’t believe I need any additional things to make the theme work correctly–the pling entry simply notes that the theme would work better if you install the kvantum theme (which I can install in kvantum but I then can’t select as a global theme in KDE settings) and then just lists the dependencies it installs.
I’m getting paranoid that I might have somehow broken the theming on this machine now with my efforts to get it to work… This is a frustrating endeavour, I’m going to fresh install Manjaro just to see if that’s what it is.
Oh dear I hope that’s not the case… If it is then my apologies for posting on this forum. I’m going to fresh install and try one more time, if it doesn’t work then I’ll select your comment as the solution.
I think this is the problem, you see a screenshot, but the screenshot author probably has done other modifications to his desktop, as I said earlier, there is no mention of any panel/dock with the theme:
You see any panel/dock here? I may be wrong but I don’t see any. Also it says that it will pull dependencies, but this is probably true only for a specific installation method, or I missed something, when I install a theme or something from KDE Store, it only gives me what is contained in the zip file.
I think it is up to you to push the customization further, the screenshot is here to demonstrate the theme use.
Thanks again for replying! Unfortunately I’m so frustrated with this process that I’m just going to select this as the answer and not bother pursuing this further as I really need to stop fiddling with my machine. I presumed I could simply install a theme and it would just look like the screenshot but I suppose not
Thanks again for your replies and I hope you don’t think they were in vain as they are bound to help future users viewing this thread!
Just fresh installed the OS and tried a non-kvantum theme Aritim-Dark which seemed to work okay… I’m just going to stick with it and never touch the themes again
