Hold on, could we?
If we created a symlink, say Background.png, in /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze
Could we make the sddm theme and this splash screen use that same file?

Hence, matching backgrounds (the default would still be Next, of course)

Finally! Now let's just get it to work.

In D19373#420768, @rooty wrote:

Hold on, could we?
If we created a symlink, say Background.png, in /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze
Could we make the sddm theme and this splash screen use that same file?

Yes, it would be perfectly possible to do that. Whether or not this is desirable is another matter of course. :) We'd need to adjust the UI in the SDDM KCM to mention that it also affects the splash screen.

This occurred to me while I was making the patch, but I decided to leave it out for now. I think whether the login and splash screens should always have the same image is an interesting idea that needs more discussion before patches are submitted. :)

I don't know... if we made the splash screen use the same image as the login screen, it would become an extension of the login screen.

Because otherwise, for a user that's using a third party wallpaper for the breeze sddm theme, you've got
(1) one wallpaper for the sddm theme
(2) another for the splash screen
(3) and a potential third wallpaper that differs from (1) and (2) provided they didn't use the same wallpaper for the sddm theme and their desktop wallpaper (which is only further complicated by having multiple users on the same computer that aren't all bound to have/use the same wallpaper).

That's a lot of wallpapers...

^ let's discuss it in a separate task (here's one technical caveat: people with different sddm themes having to select the breeze theme to change their splash screen), I agree that implementing it here would be rushing things

In D19373#420786, @filipf wrote:

^ let's discuss it in a separate task (here's one technical caveat: people with different sddm themes having to select the breeze theme to change their splash screen), I agree that implementing it here would be rushing things

Agreed

P.S. I've been using this for a couple of days now, and I really like it. Another idea (for another diff) - we could also ditch the "Plasma made by KDE" label and logo in the bottom right corner seeing as we already have the Plasma logo above the spinning circle? It makes it really subtle (and you know how I like subtlety haha)

The original rationale of the time of having the black background was to hide the flickering blank framebuffer as we switch from SDDM to the login - and we're autologigng in we're coming from a black background too. From a tech POV I like that because loading a wallpaper is quite CPU consuming.

I don't think we can ship anything without a config, if a user can configure login background and desktop background, showing a "random" wallpaper in the middle is bound to get a negative reaction.
And if we're going to put time into that, we may as well invest the time into getting rid of the splash screen (though properly, not just turning it off, but fixing why it's there)

Shipping this as a separate splash screen to the black might be an acceptable short term solution. Having new designs as opt-in first is something I would like to encourage.

Wait so the flicker's fixable?

+1 on looks

In D19373#425115, @davidedmundson wrote:

I don't think we can ship anything without a config, if a user can configure login background and desktop background, showing a "random" wallpaper in the middle is bound to get a negative reaction.

The idea we were toying with was to make the splash screen use the same image as the login screen, but in un-blurred form.

And if we're going to put time into that, we may as well invest the time into getting rid of the splash screen (though properly, not just turning it off, but fixing why it's there)

I would agree. If we can un-flicker Plasma, all the better!