Known issues

KDE apps (Dolphin, Okular) don't honor the dark theme

niri + noctalia render dark correctly, and so do GTK apps and plain Qt6 apps configured through qt6ct. KDE Frameworks apps like Dolphin don't, they render with a white file-view background regardless of kdeglobals configuration.

What's been ruled out:

• kdeglobals with ColorScheme=BreezeDark alone: no effect.
• Installing plasma-integration (trimmed to avoid pulling in kwin/plasma-workspace via pacman --assume-installed) plus QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=kde: fixes the toolbar/header chrome, but not the file-view background.
• Embedding the full [Colors:*] sections directly into kdeglobals (the documented fix for this exact symptom on other non-Plasma compositors): no effect.
• Setting the color scheme in Dolphin's own per-app config (dolphinrc): no effect.
• KDE_FULL_SESSION/XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE environment variables: changes Dolphin's functional behavior (Baloo search integration turns on) but not the color.

This is unresolved. The working theory is that full KColorScheme application needs something closer to a real Plasma session, kded (KDE's background daemon) crashes in this environment without the rest of the plasma-workspace stack behind it. Installing full plasma-integration with its complete dependency chain (kwin, plasma-workspace, krunner, kscreenlocker, ~66 packages total) would very likely fix it, but that's a real design tradeoff against running niri instead of KWin, and hasn't been decided yet.

Okular isn't currently in packages.x86_64 at all, so it isn't installed in the live session regardless of this issue.

VM testing needs a real GPU render node

niri needs 3D-accelerated virtio-gpu (virgl), not plain virtio-vga/QXL. A default VM setup shows a black screen forever because niri can never bring up an output. See Testing in a VM for the exact libvirt config that works.