KDE

From Alpine Linux

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

Note: Wayland can be used but may be less stable and Plasma may still require Xorg


Installation

Standard plasma installation

# apk add plasma

This will install the required Plasma packages, sddm and pre-configure it to use the Breeze theme.


Lightweight plasma installation

Alternatively, a smaller installation can be done:

# apk add plasma-desktop plasma-settings sddm breeze


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:


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