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.

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 smaller 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 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