Please test improved Plasma Theme switching for Plasma 5.16

Help testing the Plasma Theme switching now

You like Plasma Themes? You design Plasma Themes even yourself? You want to see switching Plasma Themes working correctly, especially for Plasma panels?

Please get one of the Live images with latest code from the Plasma developers hands (or if you build manually yourself from master branches, last night’s code should be fine) and give the switching of Plasma Themes a good test, so we can be sure things will work as expected on arrival of Plasma 5.16:

• KDE neon Unstable Edition
• openSUSE Krypton

If you find glitches, please report them here in the comments, or better on the #plasma IRC channel.

Plasma Themes, to make it more your Plasma

One of the things which makes Plasma so attractive is the officially supported option to customize also the style, and that beyond colors and wallpaper, to allow users to personalize the look to their likes. And designers have picked up on that and did a good set of custom designs (store.kde.org lists at the time of writing 470 themes).

And while in the last Plasma versions some regressions in the Theme support had sneaked in, because most people & developers are happily using the default Breeze theme, with Plasma 5.16 some theming fixes are to arrive.

Plasma Theme looking good on first contact with Plasma 5.16

The most annoying pain point has been that on selecting and applying a new Plasma Theme, the theme data was not correctly picked up especially by Plasma panels. Only after a restart of Plasma could the theme be fully experienced. Which made quick testing of themes e.g. from store.kde.org a sad story, given most themes looked a bit broken. And without knowing more one would think it is the theme’s fault.

But some evenings & nights have been spent to hunt down the reasons, and it seems they all have been found and corrected. So when one clicks the “Apply” button, the Plasma Theme instantly styles your Plasma desktop as it should, especially the panels.

And dressing up your desktop to match your day or week or mood or your shirt with one of those partially excellent themes is only a matter of some mouse clicks. No more restart needed 🙂

Coming to your system with Plasma 5.16 and KDE Frameworks 5.59 (both to be released in June).

Make your Plasma Theme take advantage of Plasma 5.16

Theme designers, please study the recently added page on techbase.kde.org about Porting Themes to latest Plasma 5. It lists the changes known so far and what to do for them. Please extend the list if something is yet missing.
And tell your theme designer friends about this page, so they can improve their themes as well.