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CachyOS KDE Plasma ​

Status: current Last reviewed: 2026-06-20 Superseded by: none

CachyOS KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland is the first-class GUI Linux lane for this repo. The active desktop safety target is now a repo-owned Breeze Dark baseline derived from a manually restored KDE reference snapshot. Hyprland and visual ricing experiments are separate work and must not change this KDE safety-net contract.

The normal docs build, chezmoi apply, package upgrade path, and asset refresh path do not apply visible desktop settings. User-visible desktop mutation stays behind explicit dotfiles-cachyos-theme commands with backup and rollback behavior.

Managed Today ​

The CachyOS lane manages durable desktop-adjacent defaults:

  • Ghostty profile defaults for the managed terminal workflow.
  • Konsole profile and color scheme defaults.
  • Fontconfig aliases for the managed font stack.
  • mimeapps.list defaults for common GUI apps.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme status and plan for read-only desktop inspection.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme backup for timestamped user config backups.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme capture-breeze-reference for capturing the current manually restored Breeze user config into local state.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme diff-breeze-reference for read-only drift reporting against the captured Breeze reference.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme reset-breeze --appearance dark for the user-level Breeze Dark appearance reset after a backup exists.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme reset-breeze --appearance dark --from-reference latest --reset-panels for opt-in panel restore from the captured reference.
  • dotfiles-cachyos-theme restore-backup <timestamp> for manifest-scoped restore of a pre-mutation backup.

See Terminal for the active terminal contract.

Breeze Reference ​

The Breeze reference lives under:

text
~/.local/state/dotfiles/kde-reference/

capture-breeze-reference writes timestamped snapshots below kde-reference/snapshots/ and updates kde-reference/current to the latest snapshot. It captures only the user-level KDE/KWin/Plasma/Kvantum/GTK/KSplash files in the desktop backup model.

Capture and drift inspection are explicit:

bash
dotfiles-cachyos-theme capture-breeze-reference --dry-run
dotfiles-cachyos-theme capture-breeze-reference
dotfiles-cachyos-theme diff-breeze-reference

Reset Boundary ​

Before a live reset:

bash
dotfiles-cachyos-theme backup

Then inspect the dry-run:

bash
dotfiles-cachyos-theme reset-breeze --appearance dark --dry-run
dotfiles-cachyos-theme reset-breeze --appearance dark --from-reference latest --dry-run

reset-breeze changes only user-level appearance keys unless a reference file restore flag is explicit. It sets Breeze colour, Plasma desktop theme, Qt widget style, GTK settings, icon theme, cursor theme, and KWin decoration and button placement. It does not use Kvantum as the Breeze widget style.

Panel reset is opt-in:

bash
dotfiles-cachyos-theme reset-breeze --appearance dark --from-reference latest --reset-panels --dry-run

The panel path restores captured Plasma shell files from the reference. It does not synthesize a custom layout, use Latte Dock, apply MacTahoe/macOS-like panels, or restart Plasma automatically.

Not Managed Today ​

The repo does not automatically apply or select these KDE surfaces:

  • Plasma panel layout from reset-breeze, apply-theme, chezmoi apply, just upgrade, or asset installation unless --reset-panels is explicit.
  • Wallpaper.
  • Fonts or display scaling.
  • Flatpak GTK overrides.
  • SDDM or login screen theme.
  • Plymouth or boot splash.
  • KDE autostart entries.
  • KWin effects such as Better Blur, force-blur, or rounded corners.
  • Hyprland session, compositor, or Wayland experiment state.

MacTahoe and WhiteSur helper paths remain available for deferred/manual experiments, but they are not the active CachyOS KDE target.

Host Separation ​

WSL and native Windows must not receive CachyOS desktop theme files or rendered KDE config. Source checks keep this boundary explicit through rendered smoke assertions.