KDE SC 4 to Plasma 5 Tutorial

[AJSlye]

Yea I know, Icon issue in Plasma 5 are getting less frequent, but they are still there.
Now Firefox with and without the KDE patches is the worst offender of NOT following the gtk+ themes, etc.

These theme and icon issues with gtk apps are more or less issues with GTK+ itself than anything else, gtk 3.16 doesn't work properly when using theme engines, and even worse gtk 3.18 has dropped support for them completely.

[NightShadow89]

Answering my own question, I think I've found where the weird ugly GTK2 icons Firefox uses are; for some completely obtuse and unknown reason to me, they're located in /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/gtk2/. Somehow, that's where the final fallback icons are, when it absolutely can't find an icon in either icon set. I haven't tried symlinking the names yet, but if someone wants to give it a go, go ahead.

Edit: Tried symlinking the appropriate images to the correct names (gtk-ok and gtk-cancel), and it worked! Now I can stop looking at ugly Gnome icons. It's obviously not an ideal solution, but until the icon mapping is corrected in KDE directly, it'll have to do.

And one more thing, when selecting something that uses the file dialog in system settings (say, trying to pick a new login sound) then cancelling, and trying again, system settings completely locks up; nothing happens even though visually, the buttons are clicked. That requires me to kill the process manually, it's annoying. I assume it's a known bug, and hope it's fixed in the next release.

[Platon91]

What will happen with GTK apps in the future if GTK don't support theme engines. When I first started using Linux and KDE, GTK apps looked all ugly and messy and out of place and could be quite a bit of work to make them look "native" in KDE. Are we heading there again?

[AJSlye]

(21st May 2015, 8:10)Platon91 Wrote: What will happen with GTK apps in the future if GTK don't support theme engines. When I first started using Linux and KDE, GTK apps looked all ugly and messy and out of place and could be quite a bit of work to make them look "native" in KDE. Are we heading there again?

Yes, it seems that way.

[NightShadow89]

I have more bad news with regards to integration, but with Qt this time, not GTK. It seems that while Qt respects the KDE theme in general, it defaults to the oxygen icons instead of following the theme. At least for one application (git-cola), this is not an upstream problem, because the code seems to be correctly querying Qt for the style to get the icon from. Is there a way to set the Qt icon theme, short of providing a copy of the breeze icons named as oxygen?

[AJSlye]

That would depend on if the application is QT4 or QT5 based, just like if an application is GTK+2 or GTK+3 based.
I could write a long post describing the differences and how to achieve a consistent look and feel, but since the Arch Wiki already has one I'll just point you to it. :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_Look_for_Qt_and_GTK_Applications

[NightShadow89]

(21st May 2015, 23:06)AJSlye Wrote: That would depend on if the application is QT4 or QT5 based, just like if an application is GTK+2 or GTK+3 based.
I could write a long post describing the differences and how to achieve a consistent look and feel, but since the Arch Wiki already has one I'll just point you to it. :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_Look_for_Qt_and_GTK_Applications

I did look at that, and to be honest, it wasn't very helpful.

But after going through the Qt source, and trying to see where it's reading its configs from, I found out that instead of trying to read from '.kde4', it's reading configs from '.kde', even though the code does try to use '.kde4' if it exists. I'm not sure where the bug is coming from, but for now, when dealing with Qt, any changes to ~/.kde4/share/config/kdeglobals should also be copied to ~/.kde/share/config/globals. This will allow Qt to pick up on the correct icon theme, so that you can get the right icons (well, most of the time anyway, some icons still use the wrong theme icons because of missing icons).

[AJSlye]

That's strange git-cola seems to be following my theme properly here, I wonder if it's not a bug in the version of application you have installed itself?

Did you install this applications from the AUR?

I found that there are two AUR entries for this application and only one of them works properly, git-cola-git.
For some reason I couldn't even get the git-cola AUR entry to even compile this last time I tried so I went with the git version..

[NightShadow89]

(22nd May 2015, 15:19)AJSlye Wrote: That's strange git-cola seems to be following my theme properly here, I wonder if it's not a bug in the version of application you have installed itself?

Did you install this applications from the AUR?

I found that there are two AUR entries for this application and only one of them works properly, git-cola-git.
For some reason I couldn't even get the git-cola AUR entry to even compile this last time I tried so I went with the git version..

Yeah, I did install it from the AUR. At some point the non-git version managed to compile, so I'm using that. I prefer to at least have a stable version instead of an unstable dev version. The fix I used also fixes Clementine, so Clementine (mostly) uses Breeze icons now.

Also, it's not so much the general theme that's broken, it's the icons. Without the fix, Clementine and git-cola end up using Oxygen icons, because Qt defaults to Oxygen icons on KDE, unless it can find the correct icon theme from the kdeglobals settings.

[AJSlye]

Qt only defaults to oxygen if the icon that's trying to be used doesn't exist in the icon pack your using or come with the application itself, but yea I get where your coming from.

[NightShadow89]

I found a better solution to Qt not finding KDE configs: add an environment variable named KDEHOME, and set it to ~/.kde4. This should be set before KDE startup.

For those who don't know how to do that, have a shell script (named maybe "exports.sh") with the following:

Code:

export KDEHOME=~/.kde4

Set it to executable (Dolphin can do it via File Properties). Add it to Autostarts under System Settings > Startup and Shutdown. Then set the script to execute on Pre-KDE startup.

[AJSlye]

Wouldn't it be better to put the shell script in the /etc/xdg/autostart?
This will ensure that it loads before Plasma 4, just a thought.

[NightShadow89]

(23rd May 2015, 23:17)AJSlye Wrote: Wouldn't it be better to put the shell script in the /etc/xdg/autostart?
This will ensure that it loads before Plasma 4, just a thought.

Whatever works best, really . So long as it gets into the KDE environment for Qt to pick it up.

[Platon91]

Finally dived in. I went though the procedure for one of my systems. Everything went fine and smooth so thanks a lot for the very clear instructions. I do have a couple of questions.

Previously in the system settings there was a removable devices section were I could just tick the various devices/partitions that i would like kde to mount on login but I can't find something similar in the new system settings? I can do this with fstab no problem just wondering if I missed something.

An other thing in the system settings, when I try to change the sddm, when i click on it it gets on of those yellow warning signs, any idea why? Also it seems very slow and can stop responding when I click on it. It does seem though that I can change the sddm theme and so on, so I don't get why that sign is popping up.

Also a more general question. What does "netrunnerarch-systemsettings-settings netrunnerarch-default-settings netrunner-desktop" do? If I would uninstall it what would change/miss.

How to get transparent window borders back? On the PC where I have kde4 still it says I use something called FormaN for window theme, is that one available in kde5 yet? Any other way to mess around with the window apperance or other "Air" like themes, couldn't find any in the settings?

The right click root actions open txt does not work? Is there some fix for this? I get asked for the psw but the file does not open. I can do "kdesu kate whatever.txt" fine and it works like that, but not the right click option.

Cheers

[AJSlye]

It's now recommended that you use device actions to mount devices and.or open specific apps once mounted.

"netrunnerarch-systemsettings-settings, netrunnerarch-default-settings and netrunner-desktop, have the various configuration files, etc. when they made the original ISO they used config files that pointed to netrunner specific directories to make system changes without overwriting files owned by installed packages. If you remove one of them the system may or may not boot up again, I just don't remember which one it was.

The SDDM issue is also related to the redirecting links of system files to netrunner specific ones as explained above.

The last one may also be related to the above issue, however you may want to do a search for this on in Manjaro forums, I think I remember the issue discussed there as well.