It has been just few weeks for KDE 4.0 release and here comes the first Plasma theme and it is called Slim Glow. As author of the theme says:

“Theme is designed with darker wallpapers in mind. Do not try it on lighter ones since it will force you to vote ‘bad’. :)

If you want the semi-transparent taskbar shown in the screenshot, you need to have compositing (desktop effects) enabled. In this version, only the basics are implemented - widget borders, taskbar, clock and notes. Other stuff such as dialog borders and similar will be changed later. Currently, they look just like in the default Plasma theme.

Unfortunately, some things in Plasma (such as task buttons in taskbar, and twits in the twitter applet) are hard-coded and can not be changed via themes (yet), so for that you’ll just have to wait.”

Grab the theme here and then:

1. Create a folder called desktoptheme in ~/.kde4/share/apps/ (if it does not already exist)
2. Extract it to ~/.kde4/share/apps/desktoptheme
3. Open the ~/.kde4/share/config/plasmarc file in a text editor. Change the line name=default to name=slim-glow

4. Log out and back in to KDE to restart Plasma, and the new theme should take effect.

[Hmm ... they have to come up with a better way of installing and managing plasma themes]

That’s it. Here is the comparison of the default Plasma theme and the one with Slim-Glow:

(my original plasma desktop)

Plasma development is accelerating post-release. The Plasma roadmap for KDE 4.1 also sheds some light on what the developers hope to accomplish: scripting, semantic zooming, much-needed documentation, support for WebKit in plasmoids, magnetic grouping, better configuration handling, panel configuration, and support for real Qt widgets on Plasmoids using Qt 4.4, and plasmoid flipping. If the Plasma developers can get all of that ready to go for KDE 4.1, it will be a major victory.

Hope to see more themes being developed which most probably will be available in the Plasma category at KDE-Look. BTW, if you are one of those who wants to create a theme for Plasma, then check out the techbase documentation of how it is done.

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