Remove border color

User Support
1

Sup everyone.
I installed KDE and yet I have that ugly color for every VM I use…
I wanna keep the default theme(not interested in installing anything from the outside), but without these colorful borders… how do I do that?

P.S. I used the latest stable version available in the website

2

The colorized border is a security mechanism to give you unforgeable hints about which qube you are working on. See Getting started | Qubes OS for details.

If you indeed wanna get rid of this, you can search for qubes-generate-color-palette.desktop in dom0 and either remove it or neutralize it. Its location probably is /etc/xdg/autostart/.

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3

Hi,

in Xfce, a way to do it is to change your window style.
System Tools > Window Manager > Style > Arc-Dark or Arc
AFAIK, Arc-Dark/Arc is the only one who make the border dark/lght instead of app qube color.
The icon in the panel and in the top left-hand corner of the window will still be in the app qube color (which is nice).

I suppose you can do the same with KDE and choose Arc-Dark or Arc.
(I don’t know which style are available on KDE, I don’t use it).
System Settings > Application Style > Window Decorations

or remove/neutralize the desktop file as suggested above.
I think that having the icon colored according to the app qube is a good compromise.

4

Sadly that just didn’t work. Removed the file, but after restart same thing.

That’s the problem… there’s only the default one with these ugly borders and some even more ugly named Plastik…

5

from the code of qubes-generate-color-palette:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-desktop-linux-kde/blob/main/qubes-generate-color-palette

Qubes modify the color scheme of the active theme at startup.
Specifically, this values:

[Colors:Window]
BackgroundNormal=%d,%d,%d

[WM]
activeBackground=%d,%d,%d
inactiveBackground=%d,%d,%d
activeForeground=%d,%d,%d

my guess, it’s because the color scheme has already being change for your current selected theme.

You can look around in your setting.
Maybe something like: System Settings > ?? > Color Theme (or Color Scheme)

What you want to do is reverse those changes.
Look for a theme.colors in this locations:

  • /usr/share/plasma/
  • ~/.local/share/plasma
  • /home/[user]/.kde/share/apps/color-schemes/
  • /home/[user]/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

You can also perfom a search in dom0 to find all .colors files (if you didn’t find it):

sudo find / -name "*.colors"

Here, an example for Arc-Dark theme:
https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/arc-kde/blob/master/color-schemes/ArcDark.colors

The .colors are probably here:
generate_palete(os.path.join(xdg.BaseDirectory.xdg_data_home, 'qubes-kde'))
in other word, probably here: /etc/xdg/qubes-kde

And those files must be used to overrides the default colors scheme.

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