Global Themes fail to install

[linuxcav]

I am trying to install new global themes from the System Settings gui. I go to System Settings - Appearance - Glogal Themes. I click the "Get New Global Themes" button. A new window appears that has the Global Themes. I then select one and click the install button next to it. After a few a little while, it generates an error that says:

Installation of /tmp/[filename].zip failed: Could not install dependency: 'kns://sddmtheme.knscr/api.kde-look.org/[number].

I have tried a few different themes and it is the same each time. Any ideas on how to fix this?

[claydoh]

Global Themes actually are just telling the tool to download and install a set of individual theming components, and one of of those bits is failing to download for some reason. This one is an SDDM login theme.
Unfortunately, the KDE Store/Open-look/Pling store that provides these items is very often flaky, at best.
Your option will be to go to that Global Theme's page, and hope the its creator has placed a list of components used, and either try installing the missing bit(s) from its appropriate section in System Settings, or manually downloading the file from the KDE Store page, or even looking for the SDDM theme name in Discover.

The specific item you are having a problem with can be found, based on that number you left off
https://store.kde.org/p/[that-missing-number]

It does seem that SDDM themes are common fail points, in my experience, but also the Global Theme may be pointing to some item(s) that no longer exists.

[linuxcav]

Thank you for the explanation and response. It is very helpful in understanding the components involved

I will say that I don't think that it is a problem with the store. The reason that I say this is that I ran a test where I tried the same thing in a couple of VMs that I have. It worked flawlessly in KDE Neon and Opensuse Tumbleweed. I'm thinking that this sddm component is not working properly on my machine or there is a problem extracting or writing the files.

I am just diving back into Linux after several years, so I'm still getting used to it again.

Thanks again for the help.

[linuxcav]

So I decided to try it on a fresh 22.04 VM. I set one up, updated it and it worked fine. Interestingly, a dialog popped up to enter my password in order extract the compressed file. This is where I get the error message on my machine. That makes me think that for some reason, it is not getting authenticated to do the extraction. I'm wondering if it has something to do with howdy. I tried using that for face authentication, but it made the machine lock up at login, so I took it off. At any rate, it seems to be a condition specific to my machine.