Bug#1115267: kde-config-sddm: "Change background" button missing.
Le 14 septembre 2025 23:06:13 GMT+02:00, Laurent Bergeron <laurent.bergeron.whatthesac@gmail.com> a écrit :
>Dear Maintainer,
Dear Laurent,
>I wanted to change the background of SDDM and wondered how. After some research that told me to click on the "change background" button in the system settings, I made a Reddit post asking why I
>didn't see it. I was redirected to another similar post made by someone who encountered the same issue as me. The answers to their post said it's a Debian 13 specific issue and that other
>distros, when on the same version version of KDE Plasma, had the button visible. Here's the link to said post:
Yes this is due to an upstream bug / limitation [1] that sddm-kcm currently writes to /usr/share. This doesn't follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [2] since this path is supposed to be read-only and under the responsibility of the package manager, so the current implementation could lead to user configuration loss.
Until this is fixed and sddm-kcm can write its configuration to /etc we chose to disable the feature in the Debian package.
[1] <https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500151>
[2] <https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04s11.html>
>If I'm not mistaking the only way right now to change the background image of SDDM right now is to change /usr/share/sddm/themes/debian-breeze/theme.conf.
Yes that's always a possibility although I would not call it the "right way". The changes may get overwritten by future packages updates as mentioned above.
Ideally we should be able to override the background setting in /etc/sddm.conf but I'm not sure if that can work with the current SDDM and theme source code. Feel free to experiment and report back if you find such a solution.
Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien
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