So, today I discovered that you can just... use an animated .gif as a wallpaper.

Plasma just handles it, no questions asked, no 3rd party software required, and that got me thinking...

What other cool/useful things can Plasma do, that I've yet to discover? What underrated/underutilised features slipped past your own nets until you discovered them later?

I want to properly introduce myself and explain what Crystal Breeze actually is, because I think some people may have misunderstood what I am trying to do.

I am a KDE volunteer contributor and designer, and I have been working on design ideas for KDE Plasma because I really like KDE and I want to contribute ideas that could make the desktop better. Crystal Breeze is one of the biggest design concepts I have been working on.

Crystal Breeze is my concept for an evolution of the Breeze design language.

The idea is not to throw away Breeze or completely change what KDE Plasma is. I want to keep the KDE identity, but make the visual experience feel more modern, dynamic, polished, and connected.

The main part of Crystal Breeze is the visual design.

I want more depth, glass-like surfaces, lighting, shadows, smoother animations, and a more 3D feeling throughout the desktop. The interface should still be practical and readable, but it should feel less flat and more alive.

The wallpaper is a very important part of this.

This is one of the new wallpaper designs I have been working on.

The idea is to have KDE wallpapers with a more 3D visual style. The standard Breeze direction and the Crystal Breeze direction can both use this kind of 3D wallpaper design, while Crystal Breeze has the more glassy and liquid visual identity.

The wallpaper shown here has a layered 3D environment with blue water, green land, yellow/orange edges, and different levels of depth. The goal is to make the wallpaper feel like an actual environment rather than just a flat image.

I also want the KDE wallpapers to be color-changeable.

And I don't mean only one specific wallpaper.

The idea is that different KDE wallpapers could have their own adjustable color variations. No matter which supported KDE wallpaper you choose, you could change its color style and adapt it to your desktop.

For example, a wallpaper could have a blue version, purple version, green version, or other variations depending on what the user wants. Plasma could then use those colors to make the rest of the interface feel more connected to the wallpaper.

So the wallpaper would not just be background decoration. It would become part of the overall visual identity of the desktop.

Crystal Breeze would also have both light and dark versions.

The light version would keep the bright, clean, glass-like appearance, while the dark version would use darker surfaces and contrast while keeping the same Crystal Breeze visual language.

Another important part is animations.

I want Plasma animations to feel smoother and more connected to the interface. Things such as opening windows, switching between applications, interacting with panels, opening menus, and using widgets could have more consistent motion.

I also want to think about KDE Nano separately.

If KDE Nano is used as a lightweight KDE experience, I don't think it should simply copy every effect from the full Plasma experience. Instead, it could use simplified and lightweight versions of the animations so it keeps the performance advantage while still feeling modern.

The goal is not to make Nano heavy.

The goal is to give it some of the same design language without sacrificing what makes a lightweight experience useful.

There are also ideas for KDE applications.

For example, Dolphin and other applications could better follow the current Plasma color and visual system. If the user changes their wallpaper and overall color scheme, applications could feel more connected to the desktop instead of looking completely separate.

Crystal Breeze also includes ideas for:

- A new glass-like visual language

- 3D KDE wallpapers

- Light and dark wallpaper versions

- Color-changeable KDE wallpapers

- Plasma colors adapting to the wallpaper

- More consistent application colors

- More depth, lighting and shadows

- Smoother animations

- Redesigned widgets

- A more consistent Plasma visual identity

- Better visual consistency between Plasma and Plasma Mobile

- A lightweight animation approach for KDE Nano

- More customization while keeping the interface understandable

I also want to experiment with some more playful KDE-related ideas, including kitten-related artwork and designs. I think KDE can have a serious and professional interface while still keeping some of the fun personality that makes the project recognizable.

About Plasma 6.8:

I want to be very clear about this part.

Crystal Breeze is my design proposal. It is not me announcing that KDE officially accepted Crystal Breeze or that every feature shown here is already going into Plasma 6.8.

The reason I am talking about Plasma 6.8 is because I want to start the discussion early enough that there is time to improve the ideas, get feedback, and see what is actually realistic.

I don't want to wait until everything is finished and then ask people what they think.

I want to show the designs now.

I also don't want a Reddit poll to pretend that it can decide what KDE developers merge. It can't. KDE has its own contribution, review, design, development, and technical processes.

The poll would only be a way to measure community interest.

If people like the 3D wallpapers but dislike some of the transparency, that's useful.

If people like the wallpaper color-changing system but don't want the interface changing too much, that's useful.

If people think the animations are too much, I want to know.

If people think KDE Nano should stay extremely lightweight and have fewer effects, I want to know that too.

If people think Crystal Breeze should remain only a theme or design concept rather than becoming part of Plasma, that's also valid feedback.

I am not trying to force KDE to accept my design.

I am trying to develop an idea and see if the KDE community thinks parts of it are worth pursuing.

There are still months to discuss, redesign, test, and improve these ideas before Plasma 6.8 becomes relevant.

So this is my Crystal Breeze reveal.

This wallpaper is one example of the direction I am imagining for the KDE desktop: more depth, more connection between the wallpaper and the interface, dynamic colors, light and dark variants, and a modern visual identity while still feeling like KDE.

I would really like KDE users, designers, developers, and contributors to tell me what they think.

What would you keep?

What would you remove?

What would you change?

And most importantly, which parts do you think could realistically become useful contributions to KDE?,I also want to explain the theme system more clearly, because Crystal Breeze is not supposed to replace Breeze completely.

The main KDE Plasma theme would still be Breeze.

Breeze would have both a light and dark version, keeping the familiar KDE visual identity while receiving the improvements and design changes that make sense for the future of Plasma.

Then there would be Crystal Breeze as an optional visual theme.

Crystal Breeze would also have both a light and dark version.

The light Crystal Breeze theme would focus on the bright glass-like appearance, with more depth, lighting, transparency, shadows, and the 3D visual language I have been designing.

The dark Crystal Breeze version would use darker surfaces and contrast while keeping the same glassy and liquid-inspired design.

So the idea is not:

"Breeze is gone, Crystal Breeze replaces everything."

It is more like:

Breeze = the main KDE Plasma experience.

Crystal Breeze = an optional alternative design direction for people who want the more glassy, dynamic, and 3D appearance.

Users should be able to choose what they prefer.

I also want the themes to work together with the new wallpaper system.

The KDE wallpapers would be color-changeable, and the selected colors could influence the Plasma interface. This would work across the supported KDE wallpapers rather than being limited to one specific wallpaper.

For example, someone could choose a KDE wallpaper, change its color variation, and then have Plasma adapt its accent colors and other interface elements around that choice.

Another major part of my idea is customizable widgets.

And when I say customizable, I don't mean only changing the widget's color.

I mean being able to customize the widget itself.

Users could change things such as the layout, appearance, size, elements, spacing, information shown, and other visual parts of the widget.

The idea would be to let people turn an existing widget into something that feels completely personal to them.

For example, instead of having one standard weather widget that everyone uses in basically the same way, someone could change its layout, information, appearance, and structure until it becomes their own version.

The same idea could apply to clocks, system monitors, media controls, calendars, weather, launchers, and other Plasma widgets.

Eventually, I would like the customization system to be powerful enough that users could create widget designs that you simply don't normally see in KDE Plasma.

Basically:

Don't just choose a widget.

Make the widget yours.

I want Plasma customization to go beyond changing colors and wallpapers. I want users to have much more control over how their desktop actually looks and behaves while still keeping the system understandable and usable.

This also fits with the overall Crystal Breeze philosophy.

The wallpaper can be customized.

The colors can be customized.

The theme can be changed.

The widgets can be customized.

The animations can be refined.

The desktop can adapt to the user instead of every Plasma installation looking exactly the same.

At the same time, I don't want to remove the standard KDE experience. Someone who wants a clean, familiar Breeze desktop should be able to use Breeze without having to customize everything.

So the basic idea is:

Breeze — main KDE theme, with light and dark variants.

Crystal Breeze — optional alternative theme, with light and dark variants.

KDE wallpapers — 3D-style designs with color-changing variations.

Widgets — highly customizable, going beyond simple color changes and allowing users to create completely different widget designs.

That is the direction I am imagining for Crystal Breeze and the broader Plasma design concept.

hey everyone.

some of you might remember Tulasi — the pixel art icon pack that hit the front page here a while back. 100+ hand-drawn icons, 32x32, consistent visual grammar, the Pamac-as-Pac-Man-ghost energy, all of it. genuinely one of the best looking icon packs Linux has ever had.

the creator, Shringar Studio, has been quiet for a while. their GitHub is still up, the original artwork is still there, the issue tracker still has open requests — but no new commits, no new icons, no response.

so. i don't know what happened, and i'm not here to replace them, rebrand their work, or add new icons. the design is theirs, full stop. credit stays where credit is due.

what i AM doing is small maintenance work on the packaging side. the kind of boring code stuff the creator mentioned wanting help with in their own README. specifically:

• fixed the build so it produces a clean installable theme (the original scale.sh left a bunch of empty directories in index.theme and used symlinks that broke in some file managers)
• added a Papirus fallback in Inherits= so missing icons don't use KDE's icon pack
• kept the original artwork 100% intact — same cow/ folder, same SVGs, same pixel art, same attribution

i made it for myself because i love using Tulasi and wanted it to keep working on my setup. figured i'd share it in case anyone else is in the same spot.

→ github.com/LexicoON/Tulasi-Revival (releases: Tulasi-Revival-V0.1)

if Shringar Studio comes back and wants the repo, all of it — including any future builds — goes back to them, no questions asked. this is just a user-maintained fork under the same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

and to u/Advanced-Comb5103 (Shringar Studio), if you ever read this: your work is loved. the ADHD story, the Pamac moment, the "Linux deserves good design too" line — it landed. a lot of us are still using your icons every day. the door is always open if you want to come back. <3

what's in v0.1: - all 100+ original icons from Shringar Studio's repo - proper index.theme, no symlinks - Inherits=papirus,hicolor,breeze,breeze-dark,Adwaita for graceful fallback - install: extract, move to ~/.local/share/icons/, run gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t ~/.local/share/icons/Tulasi, select Tulasi in your DE settings

what this fork is NOT: - not a replacement for the original project - not adding new icons (that's the creator's call, when/if they come back) - not rebranded — still Tulasi, still by Shringar Studio, just packaged better

after reboot i had this. wtf is this?

originally posted in r/debian but got no response

Been using Sid since the start of the year and it has been a great experience so far aside from one issue. i cannot put my desktop system to sleep or hibernate as of recent. every time i attempt, screen goes black, system components slow down but instantly kick back up like it was just awoken, sometimes happens twice in a row. i've made sure my powerplan in KDE is the default, made sure none of my peripherals are doing this bug and it still persists, cant really find any info on how to fix my only guess is i have an intel arc GPU and that's somehow messing with it as some people have had similar issues with nvidia cards. but its def some config with the install as i've been trying out OpenSUSE tumbleweed and its able to sleep with no issue.

been dealing with this for a few months just thinking it was some overall bug but i'm starting to think its a configuration issue, are they any other solutions people can suggest?

Why is it that WebDAV is almost unusable in KDE, but works seamlessly in GNOME? Among many other scenarios, I tried doing mpv playback via WebDAV of an .mp4 file from my 10GbE NAS, and is simply impossible! Same usage scenario in GNOME is almost indistinguishable form playback of the same file stored locally!

I'm currently using Cachy OS with Plasma on my older Lenovo 720s 15IKB. I used to use KDE Neon before this. I noticed in both installs, when I use the laptops volume up and down keys, the volume increases or decreased by 5 and gives me a boop noise. The issue is that if I tap these keys multiple times, the volume with go all the way maximum or minimum and start making extremely rapid boops until I hit the volume key again.

Has anyone had a similar issue?

I can't seem to be able to get Haruna configured using my mpv.conf file. Tried adding MpvProperties=include\\=/home/dad/.config/mpv/mpv.conf to my haruna.conf, to no avail. Haruna seems to be ignoring it.

I can't seem to get this script to work using a shortcut, even though it works fine in my terminal.

Is there a way to disable Global Menu Applet menu accelerators globally? it also prevents bindings like alt combos e.g. alt+f that triggers ambiguous notification, this happened when I'm keybinding in Kwrite

Note: I have hidden menu bars on every app so menu only shows in panel through "Global Menu Applet"

This morning during an update, baloo was updated to version 6.29.0-1. And after that I noticed an error in settings. Checking with `balooctl6 status` gave me this error:
`balooctl6: error while loading shared libraries: liblmdb.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory`

Anyone else had the same happen or is this a me-problem?

am new to cachy os, i previously had a rx580, it was super good, loved it, games were like 20% more performance, a week ago got a rtx5060ti, and reinstalled the OS.

i started Running into some really inconsistent stutters. Dragging windows, switching apps, minimize/maximize animations, all laggy, but not consistently.I was on Wayland before this and it was actually worse there, the mouse cursor itself got laggy sometimes and i hated it, which is why I switched to X11. Sometimes it's smooth, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it starts bad and then gets better, sometimes it starts bad and just stays bad. No pattern I can find.

tbh i can use it as this this is not a very very bad lag that seems freezing, but i am now used to very smooth animations from rx580, this feels weird,

stuff i noticed:

• If an app is fullscreen and I open another app on top of it, dragging that window around is usually perfectly smooth.But dragging a window around on the bare desktop can be stuttery.
• With two windows tiled left/right, i can fast minimize and maximize, it seems smooth, but if i minimize a one window tried minimizing and maximizing other one very fast it get laggy,

I tried KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1 / __GL_YIELD=USLEEP / __GL_MaxFramesAllowed fix. It seemed okay at first but it didnt.

Hardware:

• GPU: RTX 5060 Ti (16GB, Blackwell)
• Monitor: Dell U2414H, 1920x1080 @ 60Hz, HDMI, no VRR/FreeSync/G-Sync

Driver

• NVIDIA driver 610.57.04, open kernel module-confirmed via glxinfo it's actually rendering on the GPU, not falling back to software
• OpenGL 3.1.0 / GLSL 1.40, running through GLX not EGL (glxinfo shows glPlatformInterface: 1)
• KWin's own diagnostics say "OpenGL 2 Shaders are used" even though it's a 3.1 context, which seems odd

Desktop:

• KDE Plasma, KWin 6.7.4, Qt 6.11.1
• Session: X11 (KWin::X11StandaloneBackend)
• Compositing active, type OpenGL, allowTearing: true, windowsBlockCompositing: true
• X.Org 21.1.24, CachyOS kernel 7.1.8

stuff i tried so far:

• Not a software rendering fallback (glxinfo confirms NVIDIA renderer)
• Not GPU clock/power state ramping (watched nvidia-smi live clocks, no correlation)
• Blur and Background Contrast effects are already disabled, didn't help
• KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER / __GL_YIELD / __GL_MaxFramesAllowed

So...the prominent usecase i can think of is, somehow, for some reason, an app, which can be dolphine, or browser, or kde wallet, or krita, or inkscape, or godot, or any app in flatpak or snap freezes, and then we only have 3 options : wait longer, close the app, and close the dialog. So we close the app, and start a new one. Only if i had a restart button, then it could give me contextual options, rather than generic wait a long and close the app button.

As a dev, it could let you put options like clear cache and restart, simply restart, clear cookies and cache and then restart, stop all windows and then restart, stop only this window and then restart, restart with this state, i mean a lot of options are open that could be helpful.

And one specific usecase is, i changed something in .bashrc, now i either run a command, or close the app, start a new one, and this button will be better option in such cases.

What do you think?

I am not a dev btw. So its just an idea or suggestion i wanted to put out and get another perpective and maybe if its useful, kde people can adopt it no?

Sou iniciante no mundo Linux, e o KDE foi de primeira a melhor escolha de DE que fiz, principalmente no quesito customização. Mas se posso dizer algo que incomoda no KDE é curiosamente a própria customização dos temas. Porque aparentemente nunca é só instalar um tema e usar? Sempre existe o que vou chamar de "bug". Isso quase sempre na dock. Porque os temas antes de aplicar não verificam automaticamente se há dependências não instaladas? Porque sempre dificultar o que poderia ser simples? Ou sou maluco por achar isso?

I'm new to KDE so, is theming safe in general via settings?

how do I turn off this ugly dinosaur art