So I’ve loved the minimalist aesthetic of Elementary’s Pantheon desktop for a long time now. I even ran Pantheon (on Arch) for a long time but eventually the quirks and bugs got to me and I ditched it. I’ve now been using KDE for several years but still sometimes get the itch for that aesthetic again.

I’ve almost got my KDE desktop to look enough like Pantheon to make me happy EXCEPT for the completely transparent top panel.

image.png

(It’s not so easy to see in the smaller image above, but the top panel is slightly transparent. Apologies, here’s another screenshot showing it is indeed semi-transparent.)

I have adaptive transparency turned on so that the panel goes opaque with maximised windows all good. The issue as you can see from the screenshot above is that when there’s nothing maximised, the top panel is barely transparent let alone fully transparent.

I understand this is from the theme I’m using (Breeze Dark).

I don’t want to use Latte dock. And every single set of instructions I have come across about how to alter themes has either been outdated, doesn’t work or says something along the lines of, “You need to edit the theme.” but doesn’t say HOW. I’ve searched for that too and come up empty - either outdated or doesn’t apply to Arch.

Can someone please tell me (bearing in mind that I have Cognitive Impairment so breaking down the instructions is very appreciated!) how I can edit Breeze Dark so that my top panel is completely transparent?

Or if there’s a simpler way to achieve this, please let me know! :) TIA!