09/05/2026
Because it's such a simple resolution to an ongoing issue, I'll post the fix for kioworker here.
You just need an initialization for kioworker. Specifically, kioworkerrc.
Create $HOME/.config/kioworkerrc. Add the following to the file:
[KDE]
widgetStyle=fusion
Save and exit.
That's it.
What it does is force kioworker to disengage from the current functional theme and use a builtin feature instead, avoiding the clash with Oxygen which is a known issue.
If you want to offer it up for other accounts on your system, copy kioworkerrc to /etc/skel/.config
It took 30 hours of build cycles and AI assistance to figure this out. The solution may be simple and elegant, but getting there was not. This fix solidly resolves the issue. It's not a known fix by any means. The journey to figure it out included running through the core dumps, investigating dbus connections, narrowing it down to a single interaction and still having to figure out where exactly it had to be fixed and how - kioworkerrc is not a config file that shows up anywhere else. Both how *and* when were important. Several similar fixes using scoped config tags were tried via kdeglobals and the theme's defaults file, but none were applied early enough.
Cheers
