I've been working on this for a while and it's finally in a state I'm happy to share. It's all written in QML: an SDDM theme, a replacement lock screen and a look-and-feel package for the logout screen.

🔊 Sound on! The sounds in the video are my own PS3 sound files. The repo doesn't include any Sony sounds: it comes with its own original sounds, and there's a custom-sounds folder where you can drop in your own. Someone COUGH COUGH may have a link to custom sony sounds if you were to ask.

https://github.com/luk3h/xmb-ps3-theme

What's in it:
- SDDM login:
user column, an Options panel (sessions + power), and PS3-style "Restart the system?" Yes/No questions

- Lock screen that matches the login, so locking and unlocking look seamless. It handles Other User and empty/wrong password feedback, and shakes with a red border on errors

- Logout / power screen:
Restart and Turn Off with a countdown, Sleep, and a Ctrl+Alt+Del power bar

- An animated XMB wave wallpaper that changes colour through the day. The login and lock screens use the same shader and clock, so the wave doesn't jump when you log in or unlock

- Menu sounds, played through MediaPlayer so Do Not Disturb doesn't mute them

- Works fully from the keyboard

- Multi-user friendly: each user can opt out of the lock screen or sounds for just themselves

- Safe preview modes for the login and lock screens, and an uninstaller that puts everything back

Tested on Plasma 6.7 (Fedora 44). One note: Fedora 44's Plasma Login Manager can't be themed yet, so the installer can switch you to SDDM with --use-sddm, and the uninstaller switches you back.

https://github.com/luk3h/xmb-ps3-theme

Wave shader credits: int_45h and llmciv on Shadertoy, which my shader builds on.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome, especially from anyone on other distros!

Tried out the new feature in Plasma 6.8, and everything looks so much more consistent now.

I even noticed that it works for turning OFF shadows for CSD windows with forced shadows, not just vice versa. Great work!

Suddenly Firefox, pinned tasks, even PIP got a titlebar now.

How to get rid of these?

Using Breeze Windowdecoration.

KDE 6.8 mentioned full support for ICC profiles. With KDE 6.8 going all in on Wayland and eliminating the X11 session entirely, how are the KDE devs adding full color management support? In Gnome 51, I used DisplayCal to calibrate my laptop display to sRGB. When I apply the ICC profile, it only adjusts the white point. It doesn't apply any color calibration. How does KDE 6.8 get around this?

Not sure if this is a "bug" or intended, but the new KDE 6.8 update I noticed has changed the behaviour of my pinned applications on the icons and text task manager. I have separate launchers unchecked but hide launchers after startup checked, along with manual sorting.

Previously, the result of this would be that the pinned application window would replace the pinned launcher in place so they would stay (or at least start, they could be moved) in the same order that they're pinned in. Now with the Plasma 6.8 updated, this behaviour has changed. The pinned launcher does disappear, but the new window now goes at the very end after the pinned launchers. Does anyone know if this is a bug or a change in intended behaviour?

I took some screenshots to show exactly what I mean.

EDIT: Looks like there is already a bug report for it! https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527189

Hi everyone!

My experience on multi GPU setups like most gaming laptops has always been that kwin and plasmashell stay stuck on the integrated graphics despite the HDMI port being hard wired to the dGPU, even when I keep the integrated screen completely off.

The problem with this is that when you fire up a game on the dGPU it still needs to copy the frame to the iGPU for compositing (kwin) and draw stuff like the start menu (plasmashell) and then all the way back to the dGPU for transmitting over HDMI.

Now, migrating plasmashell is just a matter of restarting it with a different env var, and this tool does it, but kwin was impossible until 6.8 as far as I can tell, at least not without logging out (which closes all your apps) and logging back in.

6.8 introduced a live migration feature that is meant to make the system tolerant to eGPUs being unplugged, but it doesn't expose a setting to trigger it.

So what my plugin does is expose this setting and automating the migration based on what monitors are in use.

Hope it can be useful for someone else!

"FreeDawn" is my new sound theme for Linux/KDE. It's available now on the KDE store

https://www.opendesktop.org/p/2379312/

This took me a few months since I made everything from scratch using synthesizers, I put quite a bit of effort in it so I hope someone out there likes it.

The default sound theme in KDE is already pretty great, but I did notice it can be a bit loud at times so I tried to tone things down.

It has a very "vanilla" sound style, I tried to compose sounds that convey the meaning of the action as best as I could.

It's "Free Under CC0" so re-use it as you like for whatever!

For pretty long time i notice that when i switch to fullscreen mod in gwenview, the colors are getting like this. Theme is just not applied.

I don't want to use krunner (I use rofi instead), but after upgrading to plasma 6.8.0, KRunner wants to itself at every opportunity, which is super annoying.

I was able to suppress it a little, by disabling all KRunner keyboard shortcuts, and then in Desktop Settings -> Icons -> Typing on the desktop -> Selects items (instead of default which is 'Activates KRunner').

I also disabled all KRunner plugins, but that doesn't seem to affect whether it pops up or not (it only affects the entries it shows)

So now when my desktop has focus, if I start typing it just selects a desktop icon instead of opening KRunner. Great

That is, until I've typed a few characters, or happen to type a special char like an underscore. At this point KRunner once again pops up and grabs the keyboard focus.

This has got to be a bug right?

With Plasma 6.8, when I launch an application using Wayland (rather than the default XWayland), the fonts are severely corrupted and the colors are distorted.

Been working for months, now won't launch, get the following from a terminal:

qt.svg: :1:135167: Could not resolve property: linearGradient8471
qt.svg: :1:135167: Could not resolve property: linearGradient8473
LayerShellQt.Window.screenConfiguration is deprecated use screen and wantsToBeOnActiveScreen instead

Suggestions? Running fedora latest.

Also, has development on the project stopped?? Looking on GitHub the last release was nearly a year ago.

I want to switch to KDE plasma (I'm currently using GNOME) but I really like GNOME's ecosystem (and don't like KDE's one). So is there a way to install pure KDE plasma DE without all it's apps like Dolphin or KDE-connect

I have full dynamic theming on my system. Global theme with wallpapers set to follow the day/night cycle.

But oftentimes I'm burning the midnight oil, working well into the morning. In that case I like to temporarily go back to the dark theme to prevent burning my eyes. But when I wake up later that day and wake up/start up my computer, I want it to keep the day/night cycle going and set to the day theme.

Now, I have this half accomplished already. I discovered:

plasma-apply-lookandfeel -ka

That handles the colorscheme and icons.

But my wallpaper remains the light variant.

Now, I know I can set the wallpaper to set according to the colorscheme, rather than the day/night cycle. But I like having the wallpaper slowly lighten and darken, rather than transitioning suddenly and harshly. So that's not an option.

I don't see an equivalent for the wallpaper in any way...

There's only:

plasma-apply-wallpaperimage

Which totally ignores the dynamic setting and forces it back to static.

Is there a proper solution for this?

So I am on CachyOS and yesterday it updated to 6.8. I noticed that whenever the screen locks like from timeout, it will temporarily show the user set wallpaper. but then switch back to default lockscreen wallpaper when waking up.

This is happening to lockscreen not login screen.

I run Arch, after updating to the latest KDE desktop + framework, Chrome and Firefox show the system titlebar. Hiding it removes it from all apps. Help please.

ScreenGuard a software for Digital wellbeing natively on Linux, was my personal project which i uploaded to share with the community. Ever since , thanks to constant support and request by although a camparitively tiny but rreally enthusiatic group of ppl , I have been able to provide constant support and improvements to the application and the once raw unpolished system in starting to look...less unpolished. There are still multiple things scrambled which need to be fixed however this major pre release is most possile the final testing phase before v0.1.1 so please do try it out and report and bugs if found.

Major Fixes and Improvements:

Native C Helpers — trasitioning toward a C-Based Core daemon bit by bit

• screenguard-notify (C): Desktop notification delivery no longer runs inside the Dart runtime. A tiny native helper talks to D-Bus directly, so alerts work identically on systemd and non-systemd systems (OpenRC, runit, …) where the old path could misbehave.
• screenguard-killer (C): Process termination offloaded from Dart as well — an escalating, data-safe close chain: polite window close request → SIGTERM → full process-tree SIGKILL → Proton-native wineserver -k → guarded pattern-kill. Another step toward making the daemon core C-based.

Both helpers ship in every package (.rpm, .deb, tarball) and are wired into install, uninstall, and build-tooling.

Full Database Control (Settings → Data)

• New Data tab in Settings: live storage stats, per-day deletion chips, date-range delete, and a full wipe behind a double confirmation. Settings and limits are always preserved — only usage history is touched.
• Orphaned sessions from unclean stops (logout, power loss) are now closed on next start instead of silently inflating Past-30-days stats.

Focus Enforcement, Data-Safety First

• Strict auto-close is now opt-in. The default never destroys unsaved work: a violating app is minimized and shown a persistent warning screen.
• The warning screen offers +1 minute save grace, +15 minutes, edit limit, and close — with the screen re-appearing every 5 seconds until you decide, and re-warninng immediately when a grace window expires.
• Turning on Strict auto-close (Settings) restores the legacy instant close+kill for those who want hard enforcement — your choice, your data.

Steam & Proton Games: First-Class Citizens

• Steam games no longer show up as mystery IDs (steam_app_2730970) — real names resolve from your Steam library manifests, with per-game icons rendered from the active icon theme.
• Their usage is fully tracked and limit/focus rules now apply to them; the escalating close chain (above) is what actually makes Close work on Proton games that shrug off normal signals.
• Fullscreen games now leave fullscreen before minimize (they silently ignore minimize requests otherwise), and the GNOME extension reports the real minimized state.

UI & Cosmetic

• Settings reorganized into a clean sidebar layout with five sections: General, Limits & Pomodoro, Diagnostics, Updates, and Data.
• Crash reporting moves into the new Diagnostics tab next to daemon status and autostart, with its badge on the tab itself.
• The Focus screen's app picker can switch to a GNOME app-grid style layout — icon over name, check-badge selection — via the Grid layout toggle.

Fixes & Optimizations

• Dead-code removal across the daemon (verified zero callers before each removal) plus notification-path optimization for non-systemd systems.
• Warning screens for both focus mode and daily limits rebuilt with consistent behavior and honest reporting ("was closed" vs "could not close").

Summing Up:

ScreenGuard still has a very long way to go with my aim being:

proper category wise classification of apps and category usage stats by v0.1.5

support for 3 other desktop environments i.e. KDE, Hyprland and Mint on wayland with improved optimization for non systemd systems (like gentoo users) by v 2.0 (also more fraction of the daemon to be translated to native C)

however all of this will definitely take a lot of time primarily discovering and learning how things work out first, thus if you do like the project , then u can give me a hand by contributing to things i am currently unknown to such has other Desktop environments other than GNOME or with C programming

Most importantly, my personel project that begun "Late Nights in The Middle of June" has indeed come a long way.

Link to the pre release: https://github.com/adityakrishnan005-a11y/ScreenGuard/releases/tag/v0.1.1-beta.6