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

Installation

Prerequisites

Plasma

Install the plasma meta-package. This will install the required Plasma packages and sddm and pre-configure it to use the Breeze theme.

Alternatively, a more minimal installation can be done by installing plasma-desktop.

KDE Applications

To install the full set of KDE Applications, install kde-applications. You can also choose to install a more limited 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, this has already been setup using sddm.

Make sure you enable and start the SDDM service.

rc-update add sddm
rc-service start sddm

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. Then just start X.

xinit

For the Wayland session run

XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland