I want to share some of my experiences with KDE Plasma Themes in this post.

These themes are pretty powerful, but, as it often happens with KDE and its configuration capabilities, it might not be immediately clear how to benefit from all its power and all its themes’ power.

I’m assuming that you already enabled the KWin Blur effect (In “Desktop Effects”), which is usually the case by default. Please remember that desktop effects, like “blur,” applied to menus, windows, etc., will use more CPU. This CPU usage might increase battery usage (but, at least from my findings, it’s not that much).

First, installing a theme using “Get New Global Themes…” is not ideal. In my experiments, the installation often makes the System Settings crash; the artifacts of the theme might be out of date concerning the current Plasma version. Moreover, the installation usually does not install other required artifacts, like icons and, most of all, the Kvantum theme corresponding to the Plasma theme. In particular, the themes that I use in this post all come with the corresponding Kvantum theme. Using such an additional theme configuration is crucial to enjoying that Plasma theme thoroughly.

Thus, I’ll always install themes and icons from sources in this post.

I mentioned Kvantum, which you have to install first. In recent Ubuntu distributions

In other distributions, the package(s) names might be different.

Quoting from Kvantum site:

Kvantum […] is an SVG-based theme engine for Qt, tuned to KDE and LXQt, with an emphasis on elegance, usability and practicality. Kvantum has a default dark theme, which is inspired by the default theme of Enlightenment. Creation of realistic themes like that for KDE was my first reason to make Kvantum but it goes far beyond its default theme: you could make themes with very different looks and feels for it, whether they be photorealistic or cartoonish, 3D or flat, embellished or minimalistic, or something in between, and Kvantum will let you control almost every aspect of Qt widgets. Kvantum also comes with many other themes that are installed as root and can be selected and activated by using Kvantum Manager.

As described in https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum/blob/master/Kvantum/INSTALL.md,

The contents of theme folders (if valid) can also be installed manually in the user’s home. The possible installation paths are ~/.config/Kvantum/$THEME_NAME/, ~/.themes/$THEME_NAME/Kvantum/ and ~/.local/share/themes/$THEME_NAME/Kvantum/, each one of which takes priority over the next one, i.e. if a theme is installed in more than one path, only the instance with the highest priority will be used by Kvantum.

On the contrary, the KDE themes artifacts are searched for in ~/.local/share. Since some of the themes we will install from the source do not provide an installation script, we will have to copy artifacts manually. In the meantime, you might want to create the Kvantum config directory (though the installation commands we will see in this post will take care of that anyway):

After Kvantum is installed, going to “Appearance” -> “Application Style,” you’ll see the kvantum style that you can select as an application style (we won’t do that right now). Once that’s set, the application style will be configured through the Kvantum Manager, which we’ll see in a minute.

So let’s start installing and playing with a few themes. As I anticipated initially, we’ll install the themes from sources. You’ll need git to do that. If not already installed, you should do that right now.

Nordic KDE

https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic

This theme does not come with an installation script, so I’ll show all the commands to clone its source repository and manually copy its contents to the correct directories (see the note above concerning directories for Plasma and Kvantum themes):

Now, we got to “Appearance” -> “Global Theme,” and we find two new entries for the Nordic theme we’ve just installed:

Select one of the Nordic global themes (I chose “Nordic”) and press “Apply.”

Here’s the result (this is not yet the final intended look of the theme):

We can see that the menus are nicely blurred (of course, if you like blur effect 🙂

Go to “Application Style,” you see that “kvantum” is selected (that has happened automatically when selecting the “Nordic” global theme):

However, we still need to apply the Nordic Kvantum theme.

Launch Kvantum Manager, select one of the Nordic themes (Kvantum finds the Nordic Kvantum theme because we installed them in the correct position in the home folder), and press “Use this theme”:

and now everything looks consistent with the Nordic theme (the menu is still blurred). Keep in mind that applications have to be restarted to see the new theme applied to them:

Let’s make sure that applications like Dolphin are blurred themselves: go to the tab “Configure Active Theme” -> “Hacks” and make sure “Transparent Dolphin View” is selected. IMPORTANT: if you use fractional scaling in Plasma (e.g., I use 150% or 175%), you must ensure that “Disable translucency with non-integer scaling” is NOT selected.

Scroll down and press “Save”; remember to restart the applications. Now enjoy the nice translucent blurred effect in many applications (including the Kvantum manager itself); I changed the wallpaper to something lighter to appreciate the transparency better:

Of course, you can change a few Kvantum Nordic theme configurations parameters, including the opacity and other things.

You might also have to log out and log in to the Plasma session to see the theming applied to everything.

This theme also installs a Konsole color scheme, so you can create a new Konsole profile using such a color scheme: here’s the excellent result (this color scheme comes with blurred background by default):

In this example, I’m still using the standard Breeze icon theme, but of course, you might want to select a different icon theme.

Lyan

https://github.com/vinceliuice/Layan-kde

Lyan is one of my favorite themes (and one of the most appreciated in general). It’s based on the Tela icon theme (also very beautiful), https://github.com/vinceliuice/Tela-icon-theme, so we’ll have to install the icon theme first. Both come with an installation (and, in case, an uninstallation) script so that everything will be much easier! We’ll have to clone their repositories and then run the installation script.

These are the command lines to run to set them both up (note the -a in the Tela installation command: this will install all the color variants; if you only want to install the default variant or just a subset, please have a look at the project site):

Then, the procedure to apply the Global Theme and the corresponding Kvantum theme is the same as before. Once you have selected the Global Theme and the Kvantum theme for Lyan, you should get something like that:

Look at all the beautiful transparency and blur effects on Dolphin, on the title bars, and in some parts of Kate and the System Settings, not to mention the blur on menus.

WhiteSur

https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-kde

This theme is for macOS look and feel fans. I’m not one of those but let’s try that as well 🙂

For this theme as well, we’ll install the recommended icons (we can rely on their installation scripts also in this case):

Once the corresponding Global Theme is selected, if you are using a fractional scaling like me (as I also said before), you’ll get a nasty surprise: huge borders as shown in the screenshot (independently from the selected Kvantum theme):

However, this theme comes with a few versions suitable for fractional scaling concerning “Window Decorations” (ignore the previews shown in the selection, which do not look good: that does not matter for the final result). There’s no version for my current 175% scaling, however, selecting the Window Decoration for 1.5, the borders are better, though still a bit too thick:

If you have a Window scaling factor for which there’s a specific Window Decoration of this theme, then everything looks fine. For example, with 150% scaling and by selecting the corresponding Window Decoration, the window borders look fine:

The rest of the screenshots are based on 175% scaling and the x1.5 variant. As I said, it does not look perfect, but that’s acceptable 😉

Note that if we apply this Global Theme, the installed WhiteSur icons are used as well.

After applying the Kvantum theme as before, changing the wallpaper with the one provided by this theme, and setting the Task Switcher to Large Icons here’s the result:

Please keep in mind that if you end up with thick borders, the resizing point is not exactly on the edge, but slightly inside, as shown in this screenshot:

Edna

https://gitlab.com/jomada/edna.git

This does not come with an installation script either. We’ll have to copy all the artifacts manually in the correct folders (in the following commands, directories are created as well if not already there):

This is another theme with the huge border problem when using fractional scaling:

Unfortunately, this one comes with a single version and no variant for fractional scaling. Thus, when using fractional scaling, we have to manually patch the theme: open the file ~/.local/share/aurorae/themes/Edna/Ednarc and change the lines

as follows (these values fit 150% scaling)

For 175% scaling, use the same values but this one

The windows already opened will still show the huge border, but the new windows will show smaller borders. Feel free to play with such values til you get a border size you like most. In the following screenshot, I’m using this theme together with the Tela icon (the green variant) that we installed before and I also created a new Konsole profile using the Konsole Edna color scheme (which comes with transparent background):

This theme also provides a complex Latte dock layout, with several docks. We won’t see this feature in this post, you might want to experiment with that.

Conclusions

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that you’ll start playing with KDE themes as well 🙂