Install and Setup KDE Plasma on Arch Linux

How to install and setup KDE desktop environment on Arch Linux

KDE is another desktop manager of Linux which is used widely. In this tutorial we are going to check the installation and some other work around applications used by KDE. The tutorial will consist of Installation, Configuration, Startup and then some other applications.

KDE doesn’t allow login as root directly. If you have installed Arch Linux and using it as root, you should create a new user and give it sudo rights for running commands as root.

If you just have a bare minimum installation of Arch Linux, you probably are logging into a TTY terminal. If you are using some other desktop environment, steps remain the same.

INSTALLATION :

Step 1: Create a sudo user (if you have only root user)

You can use the useradd command for creating a new user. You can use something that matches your name.

The option -m creates a home directory for the newly created user.

useradd -m dimitrios

You should also set a password for this user. Use this command:

passwd dimitrios

Now that you have created the user, give it sudo access. First, install sudo and a command line text editor like nano:

pacman -S sudo nano

The configuration file for sudo is /etc/sudoers. It should always be edited with the visudo command. visudo locks the sudoers file, saves edits to a temporary file, and checks that file’s grammar before copying it to /etc/sudoers.

To use nano as the visudo editor, use:

EDITOR=nano visudo

Or you can use your own text editor as you wish.

Add the following line like I do in the example, then save and exit.

dimitrios ALL=(ALL) ALL

Just don't forget to add this in editor

Save your changes and exit the editor. You now have a sudo user on Arch Linux.

Step 2: Installing KDE Plasma desktop

To run KDE desktop, you need the following packages:

• Wayland session for KDE Plasma

• KDE applications group (consists of KDE specific applications including the Dolphin manager and other useful apps)

• Xorg group

• KDE Plasma Desktop Environment

You can install of the above using the following command:

pacman -S xorg plasma plasma-wayland-session kde-applications 

Once installed, enable the Display Manager and Network Manager services:

systemctl enable sddm.service
systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

Almost there. Shutdown your system:

shutdown now

Power on your system and you should see the KDE login. Login by entering password.