Plasma 6 proposal: rethink splash screen themability
Right now the KSplash appearance is themable. Users can download splash screens from store.kde.org and Global Themes can include them. So far so good.
But. Being themable currently offers a paradox of too much choice for things that don't matter, and not enough for things to do. For example, right now the most basic thing a user would want to do--change the splash screen background--is not supported. Instead they have to either fork the splash screen and change the path in the QML code, or find a new splash screen theme that has a background they like. These are not ideal ways to offer customizability for a simple background image. And as a result, https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=488&ord=latest is full of clones of the default Breeze splash screen with various random images in them. It even used to be much worse in the past when there were over 1000 splash screens with random cringeworthy computer-generated anime girls as the background, and I convinced the author to put them all in a single package so they wouldn't be so visible.
In addition, the actual QML code differences between one splash screen and another is generally small to non-existent; there are simply only so many ways to display a "loading your desktop" screen beyond what you can achieve by overlaying some icons or text on top of an image.
I'm starting to think that offering themability here was a mistake, and instead we should have a single hardcoded splash screen with a loading spinner in the center overlaid on top of a static image that's user-customizable (and can also be configured in a Global Theme's defaults
file. Custom branding for distros and Global Themes could then be provided by simply swapping out the image for a custom one.