Blog
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Aurorae is a decoration engine that allows you easily using third party decoration themes from KDE Store. It’s been around for quite a while and it has a plenty long history. However, in the recent years, it has been somewhat neglected. The UI trends changed, e.g. rounded corners are all the rage now, but there…
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Dark mode has been available in Plasma for quite a while now but the next release explores new areas where it can be taken one step further, beginning from some behind the scenes infrastructure to more user facing features such as dynamic wallpapers and automatic day/night global theme switching. My journey to improving dark mode…
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One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes in the upcoming Plasma 6.4 release is the split of kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland codebases. With this blog post, I would like to delve in what led us to making such a decision and what it means for the future of kwin_x11. Background KWin started as an X11 window manager…
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Just a quick update: Recently, you might have heard that GTK 4 added support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol on Wayland. The main advantage of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol is that it ensures consistent cursor look between apps. In Plasma, additional perks come with it, for example the cursor can look more crisp with fractional scale factors…
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Screen magnification is an accessibility feature that enlarges the screen to make text, images, and other user interface components easier to see or read. It is not something that requires constant developer attention, however, in Plasma 6.3, the zoom plugin received some improvements that I’d like to go over quickly. Pixel grid Arguably, it will…
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One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example While it can be handy for the debugging purposes, overall, it makes the Plasma Wayland session look less polished. So, one of the goals for 6.3 was to…
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SVG cursor themes is a new feature in Plasma 6.2, which we are really excited about. In this blog post, I would like to provide more background behind what motivated us to add support for them, what they are, and how to build them. (Classic) cursor theme format A cursor theme is a collection of…
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This blog post provides the heads-up about planned tablet input changes that are brewing for Plasma 6.3. KWin provides support for the tablet input protocol, but things are different on the client side. Some apps support it, some do not. If an application supports the tablet input protocol, great, it will receive tablet input events…
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Since the dawn of the times, the only way to implement any effect that has fancy user interface used to be in C++. It would be rather an understatement to say that the C++ API is difficult to use or get it right so there are no glitches. On the other hand, it would be…
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Wayland has a unique way to let clients specify the contents of the cursor. After receiving a wl_pointer.enter event, the client must call wl_pointer.set_cursor request The wl_pointer.set_cursor request takes an optional wl_surface object that represents the actual contents of the cursor. That’s it, the wl_surface interface is used both by windows and cursors! It opens…