Friday 22 March 2019

Kubuntu 18, Plasma 5 and Kvantum (3D and Transparency) Themes

22nd March 2019
BRIX

Now that I have my nice 3D Plasma 5 themes and lots more transparency - like the translucent contents window for Dolphin File Manager that I have always wanted, I suppose I should say how I eventually got it all together.

I googled and tried all sorts of things, and tried compiling from source aftrdownloading that from github. But none of it worked, and the compile kept failing, probably due to missing dependencies. However I managed to get an oldish version working when I found a PPA,

Then after all that I found an up to date git archive that downloaded AND compiled from here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/963327/how-to-install-kvantum-in-ubuntu-17-04

Here are the instructions copied from that site - Justin Case I forget the link.
A BIG THANKS to Bruno and Norbert for making this available - I wish I had found it before installed Kvantum via other means!

Copied from the link above:

For Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint, there are deb binaries available to download but for a quite old version (Kvantum 0.10.5, released back in October, 2017).

To install the latest Kvantum in Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you can compile it from source. To do this, follow the steps below.

Install the build dependencies

sudo apt install g++ cmake libx11-dev libxext-dev qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev libqt4-dev qttools5-dev-tools libkf5windowsystem-dev git

Download the latest source

mkdir -p ~/repos/tsujan && cd ~/repos/tsujan
git clone https://github.com/tsujan/Kvantum.git && cd Kvantum
git checkout master

Compile kvantum

cd Kvantum
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Install kvantum

sudo make install

Get Qt applications to use kvantum

echo "export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum" >> ~/.profile

After this, logout and log back in. To apply Kvantum system-wide, and not just for your user, you could add export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum in /etc/environment instead of ~/.profile.

To completely uninstall

If you want to uninstall Kvantum installed from source, start by opening a terminal, navigating to the folder where you've extracted (in the build folder from the Kvantum/Kvantum directory if you've followed our instructions) and built the source - e.g. cd ~/repos/tsujan/Kvantum/Kvantum/build, and running this command:

sudo make uninstall

You'll also need to remove the export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum line from your ~/.profilefile. To do this, open ~/.profile with a text editor, e.g. kate: