SUMMARY There are two ways of installing new Plasmoids: 1) by searching the store or 2) choosing a plasmoid locally. For the latter it opens file picker dialog with a filter for "Plasmoid". I've expected to be able to pick the manually downloaded Plasmoid from the store, e. g. [1], which comes compressed as .tar.gz. But due to the filter, it's not found and renaming it to *.plasmoid, it's obviously the wrong format and won't install. It'd be great to find some explanation in Plasma which guides the user on how to install a Plasmoid from a local drive, because right now it's not obvious. [1] https://store.kde.org/p/2137844
In order to transform the compressed file into a plasmoid file you can uncompress it, compress the contents of the main folders in a zip file, and change the extension from zip to plasmoid. Or, you can avoid this step entirely and place the main folder (uncompressed) in ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/. This is not something that the user is expected to know; rather, the plasmoid creator should offer a plasmoid file. You can see that many applets uploaded to the store do allow to download a plasmoid file.
(In reply to Niccolò Venerandi from comment #1) > This is not something that the user is expected to know; rather, the > plasmoid creator should offer a plasmoid file. You can see that many applets > uploaded to the store do allow to download a plasmoid file. But how does a normal user know where to get a "Plasmoid file" from? You say "many" applets, but what are many? The ones I've looked at didn't offer any "plasmoid" file and there's literally no explanation where to look for. > In order to transform the compressed file into a plasmoid file you can uncompress it, compress the contents of the main folders in a zip file, and change the extension from zip to plasmoid. Or, you can avoid this step entirely and place the main folder (uncompressed) in ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/. Is there some Wiki or info page, where one can look these instructions easily up as I haven't found those. IMO the store should enforce _plasmoids_ for download additionally to tar.gz's, so that not "many" but simply "all" offer a convenient way for the user to install plasmoids manually - if there's no explanation or hint added in Plasma.
I agree with postix here. The issue is that Pling.com accept any random arbitrary file type; it doesn't (and probably can't, due to the way it works), enforce .plasmoid files. Saying that every widget author should do the right thing unfortunately isn't realistic. Since we know what's needed to make this work (re-compress as .zip and rename), we can just have it done in the background and then accept archive file types in the open dialog. Heck, re-compressing as zip shouldn't even be needed; KPackage should be able to accept any archived file format.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/4631
Git commit a1daca3d06ee36a244d750a1d39444573ad1a65a by Niccolò Venerandi. Committed on 22/08/2024 at 19:43. Pushed by niccolove into branch 'master'. Allow manual installation of compressed files as plasmoids M +7 -1 components/shellprivate/widgetexplorer.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/commit/a1daca3d06ee36a244d750a1d39444573ad1a65a