KDE

KDE Plasma screenshot.

KDE is a software project comprising a desktop environment known as Plasma, a collection of libraries and frameworks known as KDE Frameworks, and several applications known as KDE Applications. Their UserBase wiki has detailed information about most KDE Applications.

Note: the plasma package isn't available for the ppc64le and s390x architectures due to the kdeplasma-addons dependency not being available there. However, the rest of Plasma can be installed separately to get a functional desktop.

Prerequisites

• Install Alpine Linux
• Create a user account
• Enable the community repository
• For users interested in Xorg as opposed to Wayland, install the Xorg base packages
• Install and configure D-Bus
• Install and configure Elogind

Installation

The following command will install the Plasma desktop as specified by the plasma metapackage, including the sddm display manager and other assorted niceties.

# apk add plasma

Setting up eudev on a desktop system is recommended:

# setup-devd udev

For more details and advanced instructions see Device Manager.

Note: polkit and udev are optional services for authentication and device management respectively. While KDE will function without these services enabled, some functionality may be missing or incomplete.

KDE Applications

To install the full set of KDE Applications, install kde-applications. You can also choose to install a smaller set of applications by installing any of the subpackages:

• kde-applications-accessibility
• kde-applications-admin
• kde-applications-base
• kde-applications-edu, not available for ppc64le and s390x
• kde-applications-games
• kde-applications-graphics
• kde-applications-multimedia
• kde-applications-network, not available for ppc64le and s390x
• kde-applications-pim, not available for ppc64le and s390x
• kde-applications-sdk
• kde-applications-utils
• kde-applications-webdev

Starting Plasma

Plasma can be started using a display manager or from the console.

Using a display manager

When Plasma is installed via the plasma meta-package, the display manager is set up using sddm.

Make sure you enable and start the SDDM service.

rc-update add sddm rc-service sddm start

• Select Plasma to launch a new session in Wayland
• Select Plasma (X11) to launch a new session in Xorg

From the console

The Xorg session can be launched by installing xinit and appending exec startplasma-x11 to your .xinitrc file. To start X:

xinit

For the Wayland session run

XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland

See also

• Post installation
• Flatpak
• KDE - Archwiki