Gosh, I wish there were some Docs to read.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Plasma 6 Bugs
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I tried even more of manual installing, for example I gave a try installing aurorae windows decorations alone, and transparency never works. Turns out, transparency might be totally broken with Wayland on KDE / Plasma 6, at least there are many issues searchable on this topic and even AIs seem to have learned from somewhere that "In Plasma 6 on Wayland, transparency effects may not work as expected due to various bugs and issues, especially with certain themes and drivers. Users have reported that transparency works better in X11, and some have found that specific settings or themes can help achieve the desired effect."
Damn, turns out it's Blur effect strength that is killing transparency. Found a suggestion to turn it way down and now I actually see transparency working in window decorations. I never noticed it's even possible to configure blur further in desktop effects. Thought it's just an on/off flag.
It's possible the global theme you installed didn't pull the plasma theme with it. Did you try installing just a plasma theme? Additionally, did you install the theme manually (by placing the files in the correct directory under /.local/share) or automatically (through Get New Themes or Discover)?
I tried both through discover and manually by downloading. For example the most popular theme in the KDE Store called Sweet KDE, didn't have Dolphin and some other things transparent+blurred like showed in screenshots. The only thing which has some transparency is console, but its transparency looks kinda bad, because it's not blurred. I also tried re-enabling blur in effects system configuration, but it doesn't affect it.
Transparency & blur usually requires KVantum, if I'm not mistaken. Looks like you can install it using rpm-ostree. Desktop environment tweaks
As I mentioned in OP, I also tried Kvantum, but it didn't work well because what's the point of using it if can't restyle taskbar. One of the most important things to customize for me personally. Ideally would like it semi-transparent blurred/glassy, like a shader or something.
The panel is handled by the plasma theme. I'm not sure what's the cause of your issues. Normally transparent themes work out of the box on KDE. I'd do some testing on one of my spare computers to try and figure it out, but I'm busy the next couple days.
Yes, it is not handler by Kvantum, which means if you install a Kvantum theme, it will not make your panel match that theme, so you still have to do that yourself. I found out about "Panel Colorizer" widget for KDE Panel, which looks very deep and promising, I'll try and see, maybe I can come up with something good by combining multiple approaches.
You're right kvantum wasn't doing it. Panel colorizer worked for me however. Best of luck