KDE Plasma 6 Can Now Sync Your RGB-Backlit Keyboard With Your Desktop's Accent Color

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6 Can Now Sync Your RGB-Backlit Keyboard With Your Desktop's Accent Color

KDE developers have had another busy week working on fixes for Plasma 6.0 while simultaneously preparing new features for Plasma 6.1...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6-RGB-Backlit-Accent

[byteabit]

My 3 cents:

• Spectacle: I'm happy to see and can say that Spectacle is really good now. It's live cropping functionality and instant upload to imgur with share link was the main hold backs to me. I always preferred flameshot, but now Spectacle caught up and is even better (even providing simple video recording too, if I want quickly stuff done). The live editing with arrows and other stuff can be rearranged at any time. To me its a killer app now.
• RGB: I never cared too much about RGB, especially changing colors. But have to say that automatically syncing color to Desktop Accent Color is such a cool touch.
• Mouse Button: Ability to set a mouse button as a modifier key is also nice, as my mouse has several unused keys. I think this can be done with other tools already, but nice to have it built into the desktop environment.

[HD7950]

Since simplescreenrecorder does not work in Wayland, I would like Spectacle to be as complete as SSR. I miss 3 video recording features:

1. Sound Capture, using Pipewire it should be easy to capture the microphone or audio from the desktop.
2. Modifyng FPS rate, as not all videos require 60 or 30 FPS.
3. Recording presets, to capture certain areas of the desktop without having to manually modify the capture area each time, which is rather tedious and inaccurate.

[torsionbar28]

Who uses all that gaudy RGB crap anyways? I can't imagine anyone older than 12 being enticed by all these silly colored lights.

[byteabit]

Since simplescreenrecorder does not work in Wayland, I would like Spectacle to be as complete as SSR.

Agreed, it would be nice to have a few more settings for video recording. It's barebones. But in all fairness, Spectacle is first and foremost a screenshot capture tool and this simple video recording functionality is just an added bonus. I hope they add some more settings like the bitrate control and video encoder settings. But for anything that requires more than the most basic and quick video recording, there is still OBS Studio.

[skeevy420]

Who uses all that gaudy RGB crap anyways? I can't imagine anyone older than 12 being enticed by all these silly colored lights.

I'm 39 and I use them on my mouse and keyboard. I have a Logitech G600 mouse and, well, after 10 years I still don't have the greatest memory or feel for the buttons on the side aside from the 6 farthest back that double up as desktop shortcuts. It's nice having dedicated copy/cut/paste/undo/redo buttons on the mouse. My mouse is set to be as dark as possible to make the buttons easier to see at night. I can't even tell it has lights during the day.

On my keyboard I have it set to do a reaction effect when I hit the keys. It acts as a visual confirmation that I pressed my keys.

In both cases they act as accessibility features. I'd go insane if I had one of those PCs that had more lighting and effects than the Vegas Strip.

ngraham

Are the RGB effects going to be tied into Night Light or some other clock/timer so the accent colors will go off at night or go red for Red Shift and astrology uses? Will it go on and off for standby or full screen videos? What about mice lighting? I don't mind lighting effects during the day, but they tend to annoy me at night or when I'm watching videos.

I think it sounds neat and it's also keeping up with the MicroSofts. Ironically enough, the other week my Win11 install updated and it turned on it's version of RGB backlight settings that also controls mice colors. I thought my mouse froze to a single color and that my color change button broke until I rebooted into Linux and it worked correctly and then back to Windows where it was "broke" again.

Fucking Windows. What'd ya do this time?

[ssokolow]

My 3 cents:

• RGB: I never cared too much about RGB, especially changing colors. But have to say that automatically syncing color to Desktop Accent Color is such a cool touch.

I don't think my hand-me-down laptop has RGB on its keyboard backlight, and its minimum brightness is still too bright, but wouldn't it be great if it could do white, but sync'd with the Night Color option.

[justinkb]

Who uses all that gaudy RGB crap anyways? I can't imagine anyone older than 12 being enticed by all these silly colored lights.

I have a qmk keyboard, you can program it yourself exactly how you want, with context sensitive "layers". You can also have it show certain keys backlit with specific colors depending on circumstances. It's pretty nifty (but not really accessible for the average user)

[byteabit]

I don't think my hand-me-down laptop has RGB on its keyboard backlight, and its minimum brightness is still too bright, but wouldn't it be great if it could do white, but sync'd with the Night Color option.

Maybe. Usually I don't think RGB in practical terms. The only practical usefulness to me is, if it helps seeing the keys in the dark. Which would align with your proposal to light up the key when it gets dark (dark mode, I think you mean that?). I would agree with you, as it makes lot of sense in practical terms. For stylistic reasons just for the looks and being playful, the matching to Accent Color is pretty cool to me.

[ssokolow]

Which would align with your proposal to light up the key when it gets dark (dark mode, I think you mean that?

My laptop is a hand-me-down Lenovo Ideapad that can cycle the keyboard backlight between Off, Bright, and Very Bright using either Fn+Space or the slider in the Plasma Battery/Power panel. However, it's stuck on that cold blue-white that cheap/early white LEDs have. If it had RGB LEDs, It'd be nice to have the brightness and color temperature of the keyboard match the brightness and color temperature of white white pixels on the screen.