Tao Widget for KDE Plasma 6

A meditative Yin Yang animation for your KDE Plasma 6 desktop. A slowly rotating Tao symbol surrounded by a reactive particle system — with an optional analog clock overlay.

Clock Mode	Configuration

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Features

Two render engines — choose the one that fits your setup:

• Zen (Native C++) — a custom Qt Scene Graph renderer with a dedicated GPU pipeline, pre-built vertex buffers, and a multithreaded particle simulation running on a background thread via QtConcurrent. Zero CPU overhead on the render thread.
• WebGL (Browser) — an HTML5 Canvas + WebGL fallback that runs inside a WebEngineView. No native compilation required.

Particle system

• Up to 20 000 simultaneous particles (configurable)
• Physics simulation: friction, boundary bounce, Tao avoidance, mouse attraction
• Two independent particle color channels with speed-based color shift
• Particles respond to mouse position in real time

Glow effects — two independent radial glow layers, each with configurable color and radius

Mystical Clock — optional analog clock overlay with three independently colored hands (hour, minute, second) rendered directly on the Tao symbol

HiDPI / Retina support — both engines generate textures and canvas output at the physical device pixel ratio, sharp on 4K and Retina displays

Highly configurable

• Particle count, rotation speed, direction (clockwise / counter-clockwise)
• Individual colors for particles, glow layers, clock hands
• Background transparency toggle
• Engine selector (Zen Native / WebGL)

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Installation

Quick install (pre-built)

Download the latest release and run:

kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet --install tao-widget.plasmoid

Note: the pre-built .plasmoid includes a native plugin compiled on Arch Linux with x86-64-v3 (AVX2, requires a CPU from 2013 or later). If it does not load on your system, build from source instead.

To reinstall after an update:

kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet --remove  org.kde.plasma.taowidget
kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet --install tao-widget.plasmoid

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Build from source

Building from source ensures the native plugin is optimized for your exact system and Qt/KDE version.

Dependencies

Arch Linux / Manjaro

sudo pacman -S cmake ninja extra-cmake-modules \
               qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-tools \
               kf6-config kf6-coreaddons \
               plasma-framework qt6-shader-baker

Ubuntu 24.04 / KDE Neon

sudo apt install cmake ninja-build extra-cmake-modules \
                 qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-tools-dev \
                 libkf6config-dev libkf6coreaddons-dev \
                 libplasma-dev qt6-shader-baker

Fedora

sudo dnf install cmake ninja-build extra-cmake-modules \
                 qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel qt6-qttools-devel \
                 kf6-kconfig-devel kf6-kcoreaddons-devel plasma-devel

Build and package

git clone https://github.com/postadelmaga/plasmoid-Tao.git
cd plasmoid-Tao
chmod +x build.sh
./build.sh

This compiles the shaders, builds the native C++ plugin with -O3 -march=x86-64-v3 -ffast-math, and packages everything into tao-widget.plasmoid.

Then install with:

kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet --install tao-widget.plasmoid

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Project structure

plasmoid-Tao/
├── tao-widget/
│   ├── contents/
│   │   └── ui/
│   │       ├── main.qml               # Widget root
│   │       ├── configGeneral.qml      # Settings page
│   │       └── native/                # Native plugin (populated by build.sh)
│   │           ├── libtaoplugin.so
│   │           └── shaders/
│   │               ├── particle.vert.qsb
│   │               └── particle.frag.qsb
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── TaoNew.cpp                 # Qt Scene Graph particle engine
│   │   ├── TaoNew.h
│   │   ├── TaoPlugin.cpp              # QML plugin registration
│   │   └── shaders/                   # GLSL shader sources
│   │       ├── particle.vert
│   │       └── particle.frag
│   ├── CMakeLists.txt
│   └── metadata.json
├── build.sh                           # Build + package script
└── install.sh                         # System-wide install script

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Technical notes

The native Zen engine uses a fully custom Qt Scene Graph pipeline:

• Interleaved vertex buffer — position, UV, color packed in a single 20-byte stride, uploaded to the GPU with a single bufferData call per frame
• Pre-built quads — particle quads are assembled on the worker thread and memcpy'd directly into the vertex buffer on the render thread, keeping the GPU thread as lean as possible
• Multithreaded simulation — physics runs on a QtConcurrent worker thread; the render thread only copies results and submits draw calls
• HiDPI textures — the Tao symbol and glow textures are generated at size × devicePixelRatio physical pixels with QPainter, crisp at any display density

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Credits

Developed with ❤️ for the KDE community.
AI-assisted development using Claude (Anthropic) and Gemini (Google).