KDE Plasma is getting in on the rounded bottom window corners action in its next major release.
“Breeze-decorated windows now have their bottom corners rounded by KWin automatically! This feature is on by default, but can be turned off if you preferred the older style,” notes KDE’s Nate Graham in a roundup of recent changes.
Graham also who commented on the related merge request to note though the change is reliably small it “will make a lot of folks very happy.”
Here’s a screenshot of Dolphin, the KDE file manager, sporting those subtly smoother corners in current development builds of KDE Plasma 6.5:
The change is subtle.
KDE plans to ship this visual tweak in KDE Plasma 6.5 which is not out until later this year, so don’t go play hunt-the-rounded-bottom-corner in existing or older versions of the DE just yet.
It’s also not going to apply to all apps, only Breeze-decorated windows. Breeze is KDE’s default window decoration theme and is what provides the title bar, borders and window controls shown around around applications.
On Ubuntu, native GTK4/libadwaita apps already have rounded bottom corners. Though older GTK3 apps use sharp corners on the bottom of app frames, there are tools and workarounds to force them to use rounded bottom corners – the same as on KDE.
Third-party desktop customisation tools like KDE Rounded Corners are great at forcing apps to smooth out their jagged corners but they are not as efficient as a native, built-in approach.
Adding consistent corner radii to KWin (KDE’s window manager handles how windows appear and behave) will ensure content shown inside of a window isn’t clipped by radii; that system resources and video memory get used efficiently; outlines are drawn correctly, and so on.
Some popular apps use non-Qt toolkits or custom theme adaptations and may vary in whether they use these even when running on KDE Plasma 6.5. Firefox tested rounded bottom corners on Linux a few years ago, though the effort stalled and the browser recently binned its GTK and CSS theme tweaks.
Those with a preference for pointy window corners should not panic. Rounded corners will be enabled by default in Plasma 6.5 but KDE devs plan to provide a preference to allow users to pick their preferred approach.
If curvaceous bottoms are your thing, you’ll be able to opt for a sharper look.
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