[KDE Plasma] Customized my system to my liking

ShellSurf, 8 months ago

Nice work, that looks really good and inspired me to try a few things on my desktop

megane_kun, 8 months ago

Thanks! I’m glad to have inspired you.

While KDE Plasma offers a whole lot of options for customization, it’s really daunting especially if you’re just new to it. What really helped me is to just go with a little bit of customization and tweaking at a time. As I got more experience, I started to want more and more which lead to a lot more customization and tweaking.

moreeni, 8 months ago

How much time did it take? My experience with theming KDE Plasma was that it requires lots and lots of time and patience to achieve something good. At least for a newbie.

megane_kun, 8 months ago

I’ve been working on it on and off since I’ve started using this system. It started with just the basics, tweaking the defaults, wanting more, and so on and so forth.

I usually can spend an entire (weekend’s) afternoon just tweaking things, making a change here and then, and observing if I like the changes I’ve made. Rinse and repeat that over a period of several months.

megane_kun, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Details:

The right screen has the following (KDE Plasma) widgets:

• Alpaca Clock and Weather (top-left)
• Event Calendar (bottom-left)
• System monitor sensor widget of various settings (the five widgets on the right side)

Both screens have side panels containing only a icon-only task manager. These side panels are installed on the outer edges of the screens instead of on the bottom as might be customary.

The top panels of both screens act as one whole top panel. However, both of them also have a collection of widgets (Window Buttons, Window Title, and Window AppMenu) that (should) only come into play if a window is maximized on a screen. That’s what is demonstrated in the first screenshot of the OP.

As for the theming, I used WhiteSur-dark as the global theme, with particulars overriden as follows:

• Plasma Style: Monterey-dark
• Colors: MontereyDark
• Colors, accent color: custom (#636363)
• Window Decorations: Prof Dark
• Window Decorations, Window border size: No Side Borders
• Icons: Ultimate-Plata-Suru-Plus…
• Cursors: macOS-Monterey
• Splash Screen: 1604-Arch-Splash

As for the mouse gestures. I’ve got a mouse with additional buttons, so I used one of those extra buttons to indicate that I’m going to do a mouse gesture. Those mouse gestures are taken by KDE Plasma and act like a custom shortcut, which executes an action, which I defined via KDE‌ Plasma.

The gestures are as follows:

<span style="color:#323232;">Go to the previous Virtual Desktop:                     move right, move up
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Go to the next Virtual Desktop:                         move left, move down
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Move the active window to the previous screen:          move right (a bit), move left
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Move the active window to the next screen:              move left (a bit), move right
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Move the active window to the previous Virtual Desktop: move down (a bit), move up
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Move the active window to the next Virtual Desktop:     move up (a bit), move down
</span>

EDIT: Added theming details

tsonfeir, 8 months ago

Now you just need things to put on the calendar.

megane_kun, 8 months ago

I actually am trying to get it hooked to my google calendar. That widget used to support that feature and have it work. However, recent changes have borked that functionality, and I can’t seem to find another widget that does the same.

Or I can just move away from google calendar.

tsonfeir, 8 months ago

Google bad.

megane_kun, 8 months ago

I’m weaning myself away from it. However, it’s still unavoidable in my case because my work uses it. Thus, my work-related appointments and such are on there, which is one of the reasons why I had that widget in the first place (to monitor work-related appointments, deadlines, etc).