Hi there. Like the title says: in System Settings I go to SDDM and click "Apply Plasma Settings..." which is supposed to make the SDDM login screen look the same as the KDE lock screen, but it doesn't work. When clicking the button, a confirmation dialog appears that says, among other things, "Please note that theme files must be installed globally to be reflected on the SDDM login screen." I don't know why my theme files aren't installed globally or how to make them be that way, but presumably that's what I need to fix.
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Global themes are installed in Root: /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/ and the SDDM should be in:
/usr/share/sddm/themes/
The themes per user are in the user home directory in ~/.local/share/sddm/themes and ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/.
If your theme is only in ~/.local/share... then you need to install them to the Root /usr/share directory.
You can manually move the files by elevating to root, then ensuring you set Root Ownership and permissions to the theme directory (recursively - apply to all folders and files within) using your GUI file manager or the terminal commands.
Or reinstall using the theme maintainers .deb package.
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hmm... neither of those folders exist for me, but the ones in /usr/share... do. so there is something else going on, but it's not giving me any visible errors. is there a log I could check somewhere, or a way to attempt to do this in command line?
As user folders, the user must create them. Right click an open area inside ~/.local/share/ and click "create new folder" or "create new directory" and create plasma and then enter it. Repeat to create desktoptheme
Back to the ~/.local/share create sddm, enter it and create themes
You can do this in CLI, as well:
cd ~/.local/share
mkdir sddm
cd ~/.local/share/sddm
mkdir themes
The dot will elevate you up one directory. We want to go up two directories back to share, so two dots or periods:
..
mvkdir plasma
cd ~/.local/share/plasma
mkdir desktoptheme
That's great but why would creating local themes fix the issue if KDE Settings wants me to have global themes?
You are right. What happened was a little time passed and I read your post at face value instead of in context of the problem listed in the thread.
oops
So, the theme is set globally by being present in Root... Are you certain you are using SDDM instead of GDM? GDM is the default on Zorin OS. You may have installed Plasma and sddm along with it, but not necessarily changed from GDM to SDDM.
You can check what your default is with
cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager
If you are using Wayland, I think that command should still reference the bin file... I am not sure. I could be wrong but Wayland using Plasma would likely patch it with XWayland in order to reference and use the Xserver while also using Wayland in order to fix what Wayland cannot do... Which... defeats the whole point of using Wayland if it will quietly just use X in the background anyway...
If you are set to GDM instead of SDDM, you can run:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure sddm
Select SDDM from the list, then reboot once completed.
Reasonably certain it's SDDM since it looks completely different from GDM, but I will run the command anyway.
Yea it's SDDM.
Can you link the theme? Check which version SDDM you have installed - maybe we need to check if the theme you are using is compatible with the SDDM version.
It's just Breeze Dark with a different wallpaper. As a quick experiment I've set the lock screen settings to default and will try again.
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Actually wait - the SDDM theme is Debian Maui. Maybe that theme for SDDM isn't compatible with the Plasma settings?
<searching...>
Okay yep that's what it is. I'm used to KDE coming in with its own SDDM theme and I guess that's what I thought "Apply Plasma Settings..." would do.
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Personally I can't stand SDDM as it always seemed to bring up the accessible keyboard to enter login details. I don't seem to have issues with the fact that my Plasma on Zorin is using gdm3 as the desktop manager. You will find however that some themes won't install because they could well have been designed for Plasma 5.27 or later. Zorin is stuck at Plasma 5.24. My preferred Plasma OS's are Q4OS and PCLinuxOS and MX-Linux which use Plasma 5.27 and use X11 (xorg) as the default compositor instead of Wayland. Something else to consider at login on Zorin. See if you get a better Plasma experience when choosing to login on Zorin on xorg instead of the default Wayland.
After coming back to this multiple times I finally resolved the issue the way I originally wanted.
For some reason my install of plasma did not include the default Breeze SDDM theme as part of it. This can be manually installed with sudo apt install sddm-theme-breeze. It CAN'T be found in the settings app's "Get More Themes..." as that's ONLY for user-created themes. Hopefully the next person with this issue will now be able to find the answer faster than I did.
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