openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma Style

I am happy to say that I now have published my openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma Style for the world to use. If the color scheme I have previously release is any indicator of interest, there will be a few dozen that download it and that is good enough for me. I will be quite content if at least two others check this out. I am just happy I have finally navigated my way through using the Plasma-SDK, Git and the Pling.com site to make this happen.

If you are interested in making your own Plasma Style, the easiest way to get started with it is going to be using the SDK. It essentially restores some of that Plasma4 functionality to Plasma5 in customizing your desktop. I do wish this little thing would have been better publicized but at least it has been made and I did happen to find it.

For openSUSE, you can install the SDK by running this in the terminal:

sudo zypper in plasma5-sdk

I would consider this to be a very minimal SDK but it is enough to get you going to make the changes you desire.

The biggest change, and really, the only two changes of which I was most interested was changing the “Start” icon to using the Geeko button for the menu and the swapping out the shades of blue for shades of green to more closely match the openSUSE Branding guidelines. I say “closely” rather than “exactly” because if I had used the colors exactly, there would have been, in my opinion, too much contrast so I muted or de-saturated the colors a bit. I hope the marketing folks at openSUSE can forgive that slight change a bit. These colors are also what I use for my openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma color scheme so it should match up nicely with that.

I made no alterations on the GTK side of things. The GTK theme was set to “Breeze” which is the default. I do have some issues with some GTK apps but that is a general encumberment of the GTK toolkit that will hopefully be less of a thing as time goes on.

It should be noted, that if you are interested in doing something more like the Breeze Twilight, that will work well with this Plasma Style too. Using my Plasma Style and the already bundled openSUSE color scheme, I think it fits quite well, except that, for me, the brightness is somewhat painful for my eyes.

This Plasma Style can be downloaded from the Pling.com site or hopefully by the time I hit publish on this article, right from the System Settings tool. I have already seen my color scheme in that fancy little widget which was an exciting experience for me.

I would go into the process of creating your own “Product” such as a theme or color scheme on Pling but at this point, this article is long enough and there will be a third part to this where I can go into detail and tie this Scheme/theme trilogy up in a nice little bow.

Final Thoughts

I am quite happy with how this theme has turned out. My next step is to create a “Global Theme” to make my openSUSE flavored Breeze Dark theme a one-click option for easy deployment. Maybe, if the right people like this that do the visual branding for openSUSE, they can include this in the lineup as well. I really think it is pleasant on the eyes and gives that openSUSE vibe with that Breeze Dark awesomeness. To me, it is the perfect blend of visual desktop enjoyment.

References

openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma Color Scheme Published
openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma Style
openSUSE Branding guidelines
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Artwork_brand