KDE developers continue preparing Plasma 6.6, and although there are over a month to go before the final stable release (scheduled for February 17, 2026), the team posts weekly updates on the KDE Blogs about what changes to expect from this version. After I covered some of them recently, now we have a new batch to look at.
One of the most notable recent additions is the ability to save the current visual configuration as a new global theme. Users can now capture their active color, window decoration, icon, and other appearance settings directly from System Settings, simplifying theme creation and reuse without manual component selection.
Slightly off topic, but man, I wish there was a nice way to track all changes in all settings. I don’t really wanna go immutable. I also know about software that tracks directories like
/etcas agitrepo, but that’ll only track the newer changes. I want something that can help me replicate my current setup easily.Oh hell yeaaa
Of course they do this after I spent many hours making themes lol
About time! Waiting for this feature for literal decades
Oh shoot, while we’re at it, is there a way to change default settings for things? I’m not even sure where to start looking, documentation-wise.
I want my taskbar to never group by names, but I regularly need to set that again each time I theme-hop.
It’s got to regenerate that from somewhere, right? Feels /var/lib-esque, I’ll look thereOh these values get stored somewhere in I think either ~/.config or ~/.local I forget which one, so you can change them and check the file to see the code you it, but I have some examples here
Maybe you can use kfind to figure out the root file that has these values
Oh nice, I think I’ve used that theme.
I was imagining something a little different.
I had in mind something like xfce’s XML files where settings can be locked at the system level, so when they’re generated at the user level, those individual settings refuse to be masked.
I think for Plasma I’d need a script that runs after the theme has been changed that flips the “group-by” setting back to “never”.
I’m pretty sure distributions are able to change the defaults, too, so it has to be possible. I’m sorry I don’t have more to add besides vague assurances about feasibility, but at least you know you’re not crazy for trying, I guess.
I just need to run a pacman -Ql on the package. I’m guessing it takes the normal sequence of ~ dotfiles if present, else etc, else var lib.
I looked it up, there’s some promising stuff in qmls in /usr/share/plasma, desktop configuration in plasmoids, but that includes a panel configuration qml higher up.
Even if I do tinker with that, an update would wipe it out. I wasn’t able to find any equivalent in etc, maybe as with most things on Arch it’s “some assembly required”.
