When opening menu over other apps or a desktop with strongly colored elements, the menu is so transparent that the menu text becomes difficult to read. I can make the background even more transparent with WINDOWKEY + mousewheel but cannot decrease the transparency to yield a readable menu. A dark theme fixes some of the transparency but then text contrast becomes an issue. A related problem is that the text in some apps is so grey and non-contrasting that it is difficult to read. I cant find anything in the user interface or settings to correct these problems.
There's a possibility that this will be improved in Plasma 5.13, as there's a new blur for transparent elements that makes the background blurrier and improves contrast. Can you add a screenshot showing the issue? > A related problem is that the text in some apps is so grey and non-contrasting that it is difficult to read. You can change the color to be darker in System Settings > Color. Increasing the default text size by 1 pt to 11 pt helps a lot, as a 10pt font looks grayer and wispier at 1.0 scale that it should be compares to an 11pt font. It's possible that one or both of these changes will resolve the issue; can you confirm? Also, if by "some apps" you mean apps that use Kirigami and QML rather than QWidgets, the situation has been improved as of https://cgit.kde.org/qqc2-desktop-style.git/commit/?id=9a5f7d834f86f57e88c3993fbcf4c17d09a01e10 Can you attach a screenshot showing the text contrast issue for these other apps?
Also, can you make sure that System Settings > Desktop Behavior > Desktop Effects > Background Contrast is turned on?
Created attachment 111594 [details] screenshots of transparency and contrast issues.
You want to also turn on the "Blur" effect, which is visibly off and right underneath the "Improve background contrast" effect. See if that helps. Otherwise, you might also try choosing darker text in System Settings > Colors.
I have turned on the blur effect and set all text colors to black. The result is not satisfactory. Something else in Plasma5 is overriding my settings because text is still grayed and backgrounds are transparent. There is a key combination ALT-WindowKey that allows one to make the background even more transparent but it does not allow one to eliminate the transparency altogether. I think that if I set the text color to black, the software should respect my setting rather than deciding to gray the text for me. I also set all of the text size to 12 points but the Plasma5 system overrides that setting also.
Transparency of the windows and gradient graying of text should be under user control and there should be: 1. an option to disable transparency entirely 2. an option to turn off text graying 3. instructions on how to build or customize a theme to accomplish 1 and 2.
(In reply to Regnad Kcin from comment #5) > I have turned on the blur effect and set all text colors to black. > > The result is not satisfactory. Can you attach a screenshot showing what it looks like with blur and black text? > Something else in Plasma5 is overriding my settings because text is still > grayed and backgrounds are transparent. There is a key combination > ALT-WindowKey that allows one to make the background even more transparent > but it does not allow one to eliminate the transparency altogether. > > I think that if I set the text color to black, the software should respect > my setting rather than deciding to gray the text for me. It does. Or at least, it's supposed to. If it doesn't, that's a bug. ("it" means KDE software; other software generally does not respect KDE color settings) > I also set all of the text size to 12 points but the Plasma5 system > overrides that setting also. You set that in System Settings > Fonts?
Created attachment 111680 [details] screenshot of transparency with blur, black text, font > 12 pt. doesnt help to turn on blur note grayed text in menu
It looks like the amount of blurriness in the blur plugin is turned down to the lowest setting. Go to System Settings > Desktop Behabvior > Desktop Effects > Blur > Click on configure button and then increase the blurriness (the default setting is maximum, not minimum, so this may be an issue with your distro's default configuration). As for the color, I'm confused, because it looks like you haven't changed anything. Can you attach a screenshot of System Settings > Colors? Note that Firefox doesn't respect the systemwide color settings, so that's not a good app to test against.
Created attachment 111683 [details] color settings Blur is set to maximum (strong) Blur or no-blur I would like to be able to totally cancel the transparency effect in the menu. This kind or transparency serves no useful purpose and it is extremely irritating. I dont find it to be cute or snazzy.
Do any of these issues happen in a new clean user account?
I created a new user "test" and kept all of the defaults except that I made sure that contrast and blur were turned on. Transparency issue was at least as serious as before.
What distro and version of it are you using? Are you in a VM?
I am using Slackware 64 -current and Alien Bob's -latest KDE5 (non-Wayland): KDE 5_18.03 for Slackware, consisting of the KDE Frameworks 5.44.0, Plasma 5.12.3 and Applications 17.12.3. All this on top of Qt 5.9.4. my machine x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz Asrock Z270M-ITX/ac Motherboard Onboard Graphics
Given that it reproduces with a fresh user account, at this point it seems like a distro packaging issue. Pleas contact the Slackware folks or Alien Bob to further troubleshoot the issue.