Fuzzy/aliased text on transparent windows with blur enabled when the background behind a window is white

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

For some time now on Plasma 6, notification windows or any window with blur enabled will cause the text displayed within it be fuzzy or aliased (for lack of a better word) when the background behind it is white or bright. Example images are attached:

Screenshot_20250704_233131
Screenshot_20250704_233131537×448 49.8 KB

Screenshot_20250704_233101
Screenshot_20250704_233101536×446 64.6 KB

Does anyone using a plasma theme with blur enabled encounter this issue? Or is it something to do with my system specifically? I use Darkly for my Application Style, but that seems to not affect it as when I change back to breeze the behaviour is the same. The plasma style in the picture is Amethyst, but it happens with others that use blur as well.
And a final question, is this a known bug?

2

Apparently this happens even with blur disabled. Has anyone running KDE encountered this issue at all or is it some other specific issue? I just need an answer to have peace of mind.

3

So this might be related to a specific bug that I thought was squashed .. but try this ..

In /etc/environment place the following environment variable;

QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY="RoundPreferFloor"

OR you can do so with just running this one-liner command below;

echo 'QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY="RoundPreferFloor"' | sudo tee -a /etc/environment

And reboot.
How does it look?

4

Nothing changed. Same behaviour. I presume this is an issue that won’t go away unless I do a reinstall if this a circumstantial bug that is probably related to old plasma5 configs and packages (or maybe some other unknown issue)

5

Then not the same, even though it looked similar.

I also realize now that icons are affected as well.

If this is true .. then it was highly encouraged, nigh a requirement, to run the ‘plasma refresh’ commands as seen here;

Which I have also simplified with some additional messaging into this one-liner command;

cd ~/.config && for j in plasma*; do mv -- "$j" "${j%}.bak"; done && mv Trolltech.conf Trolltech.conf.bak && rm -rf ~/.cache/* && kbuildsycoca6 --noincremental && cd ~ && echo -e "\nFinished Clearing Plasma Settings and User Cache.\n\nPlease Reboot.\n"

For packages .. you probably need to go and check on them.

I did remove all of kf5 after Plasma 6 that I could with

sudo pacman -Ru kf5

And you could list orphans with

pacman -Qdtq

Or print ‘foreign’ packages (including local, AUR, and deprecated) with

pacman -Qmq
6

I ran the one-liner and removed all plasma 5 packages that I could find, it still didn’t fix the issue unfortunately. But thanks for trying to help me. I guess I’ll stick with the bug because reinstalling and setting things up again would take too much time.

7

I have one more font env var line in my environment file that is commented out..

Apparently I didnt comment it well enough to be sure what it was for originally, but hey, worth a shot;

# Fonty font
FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"
8

Didn’t work. But thanks for trying to help.

9

Sad days.

Care to include some system info?

inxi -Farz | eos-sendlog

Also maybe check on

kcmshell6 kcm_qtquicksettings

In case it is something weird for some reason.

10

https://0x0.st/8G8k.txt

For Rendering backend I switched to Vulkan to fix some issue I had with an app I don’t remember.

11

Oh?
Might we try OpenGL or reverting to ‘auto’ ?

12

No change. Unless a reboot is needed.

13

I think a reboot would be needed.
What is the result?

14

Unbelievable, that was the issue. Thank you. Went back to auto.

1 Like
15

The backend being changed is such an oddly common thing rather specific to this particular forum.

( Otherwise I would not have even thought to check that. )

It makes me think some guide or some user is going around encouraging people to flip these settings for some reason when they probably should not ..

Anyhoo. Glad its sorted. :slight_smile:

16

I don’t think there’s a particular user. I just found this recommendation (somewhere on the internet I dont remember) when I had an issue with nvidia’s nsight profiler (UI issue) on wayland, but certainly not here.

17

Maybe just a coincidence then.
Theres been a handful just lately, like this one over here (and what it links to):

While I dont see the same kinds of posts/problems on Manjaro, Cachy, Arch forums or anywhere else really. Just here where its oddly common. :person_shrugging:

18

Oh well. Some people have oddly specific issues that seem to get resolved when changing the renderer backend, but then that introduces new bugs unbeknownst to the user doing the fix. Like I knew nvidia is difficult on wayland so I was willing to try oddly specific things to fix whatever was bothering me, but for AMD it’s a rather odd thing to see. Anyways, things are expected to break with wayland and if you ask me I wouldn’t have forced people to switch to wayland this soon. Still plenty of bugs.

19

Wayland is still not forced.
The Plasma X11 session is still available.
( But maybe you missed the announcement about the package split - you just need plasma-x11-session package. )
Though in general I would say folks should avoid X11 for various reasons like security.
Of course nvidia has always presented its own proprietary hurdles .. which might slowly change thanks to nvidia-open .. but if the green track record is anything to go by I wont too optimistic just yet.

1 Like
20

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.