Plank has lost it's transparency?

[stever]

Hi, first post here....

I am running Kubuntu 20.04, Plasma 5.18.8 and kernel 5.13.0-39-generic. Fully updated.

Sometime over the last few days, Plank has lost the ability to have a transparent background.

Can anyone give me some advice with this?

Thanks

Steve

[claydoh]

I can't say much, other than Plank hasn't seen an update since 2019, and I am not sure what it uses to provide transparency, or how it stores it settings. I recall some years ago Plank not saving settings cjhanges unless it had some missing Gnome or dconf backed for that. This was ages ago, though, so it probably is not relevant here.

Are all your desktop effect and any transparency settings for Plasma working as expected? Also look to see if your compositor hasn't been turned of/disabled in System Settings.
Do other transparent Plank themes work?

[stever]

Thanks for answering... none of the plank themes seem to have any effect on the background at all it's just always black.
I tried a couple of transparent widgets that I guess are square with transparency (eg the clock) and they were fine.

I checked the compositor and it actually said it had crashed at some stage and OpenGL Detection was off so I re-enabled that but it had no effect.

I will dig around and see what I can come up with.

Cheers

Steve

[stever]

When I start plank from the command line I see this.... I guess the clues are in there somewhere.

Steve

[Preferences:192] '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' is read-only!
[WARN 18:45:29.871599] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'OuterStrokeColor' for group 'PlankTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default
value
[WARN 18:45:29.871651] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'FillStartColor' for group 'PlankTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default v
alue
[WARN 18:45:29.871699] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'FillEndColor' for group 'PlankTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default val
ue
[WARN 18:45:29.871734] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'InnerStrokeColor' for group 'PlankTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default
value
[WARN 18:45:29.871782] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'HorizPadding' for group 'PlankDockTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default
value
[WARN 18:45:29.871827] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'ItemPadding' for group 'PlankDockTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using default
value
[WARN 18:45:29.871863] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'IndicatorSize' for group 'PlankDockTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using defaul
t value
[WARN 18:45:29.871884] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'IconShadowSize' for group 'PlankDockTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using defau
lt value
[WARN 18:45:29.871906] [Preferences:378] Missing key 'UrgentBounceHeight' for group 'PlankDockTheme' in preferences file '/usr/share/plank/themes/Transparent/dock.theme' - using d
efault value