Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I’ve been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.
But, I’ve noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.
So now I’m considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it’s being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I’m sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I’m not sure I want to get into.
Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it… but it’s Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that. https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475
I was having the same issue with discover when I was trying LXQT a few weeks ago and I wasn’t able to find a fix. This post made me look into it more and according to this reddit post, Discover uses the Kirigami UI framework, this led me to this forum post which says that you need to install the ‘plasma-integration’ package to make QT themes work with Kirigami based applications.
Incredible. I have never even heard of a Kirigami, and here I only thought I had to worry about if applications were Qt (which version) or GTK (also which version) and running under Xorg or Wayland. What the hell is a Kirigami. Well, thanks for the heads up. Such are the joys of being a Linux user!
Update: I checked last night and I already had the plasma-integration package installed this whole time. I’m stumped.
The forum post says that plasma-integration will conflict with qt5ct or qt6ct, so you could try removing those packages and see if that works.