Liquid glass widgets for KDE Plasma 6.

Glass without a compositor

KWin's blur can't help a desktop widget. It lives inside the same plasmashell window that paints the wallpaper, so there's nothing behind it to composite. Each card samples the live wallpaper item directly, crops the part under the card and runs it through a small shader pipeline.

That pipeline is a Dual Kawase blur one to five levels deep, a squircle mask so the corners curve the way glass does, refraction at the edge using Snell's law through a dome-shaped bevel with a touch of chromatic split, and a thin specular lip that follows the cursor on hover.

Cheap when nothing moves

The blur only re-runs for a moment after something changes: the card moves, resizes, or the wallpaper changes. A still desktop costs next to nothing. In panels, where there is no wallpaper behind the card, it falls back to a plain tint.

Tint you can tune

Every widget has Glass blur and Glass tint in its Configure page. Tint runs from clear to 0.8, with 0.42 as the default. The gallery below shows each widget across that range.