Some of you might know about the lightly qt theme
https://github.com/Luwx/Lightly
https://github.com/boehs/Lightly
And if you know about it, you know support for it in recent times has been questionable. That’s what I want to change, but I need someone to help me. I have experinence in similiar stuff, like I have my custom userstyle for firefox (https://github.com/Bali10050/FirefoxCSS), I have a custom animated cursor, custom plasma themes, custom aurorae themes, a custom kvantum theme, custom color themes, and I even made a custom theme for gtk2 when it was a thing(that one is not on the internet, the others can be found at https://www.pling.com/u/bali10050). I have some experience in programming, but it’s python, and this project is not, and I also done nearly 0 graphical stuff in that. But, I heard that qt supports css like stylesheets (https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/stylesheet-reference.html) and I can also do some very basic things in c++ and rust. Can somebody help me revive this project, or help me find where to start?
Afaik the “original” Lightly was born as a fork of Breeze, which in turn was born a fork of KDE4’s Oxygen. So all of them are written in pure C++.
Now, I heard Luwx/Lightly was stalled so they forked it in boehs/Lightly, merged some pending patches and even did a new branch to port it to Qt6 - but last time I tried to compile it, it failed. Not sure if they’re still working on it, though. (From my part never liked Breeze but found about Brise, which I found much more torerable).
If I were you I’d try to get in touch with the mantainers of boehs/Lightly. If that doesn’t work, I’d go to ask the KDE VDG (I guess they should be reachable at discuss.kde.org); at least they should redirect you to someone versed in Qt C++ styling - which is very complicated, at least for me, 'cause C++ is no easy thing and it seems there’s almost no documentation at all about the subject. Pinheiro himself struggled to find someone with enough knowledge of C++ to help him with his O^2 theme.
If that doesn’t work either for whatever reason, which I doubt ever happens, I’d try asking Carl Schwan as a last resort, the guy that came up with Brise. He helped me with a stupid patch for it - of course he knows his thing and seems to be very cool.
How do you install brise? Is it available in the KDE store? Somewhere in the AUR. The readme only show to build it with kdrc and I have no idea how to do that.
If you’re using Arch and it’s in the AUR, I’d look into that. Otherwise you’d need to compile it by yourself.
If you don’t feel like compiling stuff, you’d want to file a bug against your distro so there’s someone willing to step up as a package mantainer to prepare a package for it and make it available for your distro.
It’s not in the AUR unfortunately, and I’m ok with compiling it myself, but I have no idea how since there are 0 instructions on their gitlab. There could be instructions there, but gitlab confuses the shit out of me.
Download it,
cdto its directory, and do the standard procedure to compile a Cmake project:mkdir build && cd build cmake .. make sudo/doas make install
The one by boehs works no problem on plasma 6 for me. It has recent work done on it if you like at the GitHub page. Also, I could have sworn that I have seen qt6 somewhere when I installed from the AUR the other day.
The original hasn’t been touched in years, and even boehs’ most recent commit was 7 months ago. I plan on creating a new readme first, and fixing the install(currently you can only install it onto plasma6 if you follow a guide from the boehs fork issues page), then if I can find people that are interested, I’ll start packaging it to some distros. If I can do all this, I’ll start adding my own developments to it. Also, this fork will be very different from boehs in that he doesn’t want to diverge too far from upstream, but I don’t really care about the catch-up game, I think that it only holds up the development
Then I don’t know honestly. I just installed it from the AUR and it has been working no problem. Hey, I am not an experienced developer, but I dabble. I am willing to help with whatever shit knowledge I have. I can also test since I have a couple of extra laptops. Let me know. Just a heads-up, I’m not always 100% available. 2 kids (one special needs) and a full time job, but I’ll do the best I can :)
I created a fork today on github, and I started writing a new readme, and I fixed the installation for plasma 6, based on the instructions found in the fork of boehs’ issues tab
https://github.com/Bali10050/Lightly
I plan to do this as a side project, and it most likely will depend on others contributions, because I almost know nothing about c++. Luckily Luwx left the project as mostly done, so if we can just maintain it, and help people fix their issues, then the job is done, and if we can make some buttons nicer, or something, then forking it from boehs will become a really great decision, not just a useless splitting of resources.
Great work. I’m going to pin it to my browser and take a look around. I know 0 about C++ (mostly work with C# at work), but hey anything I can do I will do. Thank you.
