Installing KDE Plasma
Transform your desktop with the smooth, svelte, sumptuous experience that is KDE Plasma and go complete next-gen with the Wayland too!
There’s no official Linux Mint KDE edition these days, but that doesn’t mean Mint users should miss out on the wonderful experience that is KDE Plasma. It’s modern, but still has a traditional applications menu. It’s incredibly polished, but is nowhere near the resource hog it used to be. Oh, and its Dolphin file manager is a joy to work with, especially if you’re finding Nemo a little too simplistic (like that attempt at Pixar humour – Ed). Be that as it may, installing a new desktop environment comes with consequences, and it’s good to be aware of these before you blame us for ruining your system.
Firstly, there’s the disk space hit. The smallest KDE Plasma metapackage provides a minimal desktop, but according to the screenshot it pulls in some 850MB of dependencies in 446 packages. If you go for the full-fat edition, with all the applications from the KDE ecosystem, that will cost you close to 3GB. Next is the duplication of core utilities such as text editors, media players and screenshot tools. These all start to crowd your application menus, and if you use, say, KDE’s Dolphin file manager in Cinnamon, it looks a bit odd.
Finally, it’s sometimes hard for apt to completely uninstall a desktop. It’s likewise hard to repair a broken desktop after you attempt to clear out packages manually. So don’t do that; instead, try things out in a virtual machine first, or make use of Timeshift to restore things to a known good state (as we demonstrated earlier).
Having installed (at least) the Plasma desktop we can opt to change the display manager (which provides the login screen) from the Mint-themed LightDM to the Qt-powered SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager). If you installed from the command line this will be offered to you, and if you didn’t you can get to the configuration by running: $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Both display managers work with all major Linux desktop environments (and lightweight window managers), so which you choose is a matter of personal preference – or whichever you can find the prettiest themes for. The default SDDM theme is probably not most people’s idea of pretty, but once you’re logged in it’s easy to change this from Administration > Login Screen (SDDM). For some reason, perhaps an attempt at irony, we found ourselves using a Windows 10-like login theme. Never mind that, you’ve probably just found yourself immersed in the wonderful world of KDE Plasma. Behold the cool Breeze theme, marvel at the polish and feel at home with the knowledge that all your favourite Mint tooling is just a click away.
KDE 4, now largely retired, received occasional criticism for being too configurable. In part this was fair. Every widget (and there were a lot of widgets) could be configured, a clumsy edit mode gave them a handle about which they could be rotated or stretched, and one was sometimes left wondering what the point of all this was. Worse, successive iterations of KDE 4 got very good at hiding all kinds of key options just when you thought you’d got a handle on where they ought to be. That version of KDE also faced criticism for being something of a resource hog, and shipping with all kinds of graphical frippery enabled. Modest machines would probably have been fine with this, but as the graphics driver ecosystem of the era was far more fragile back then, hardware acceleration was not something that one could count upon.
You’ll be pleased to hear, then, that KDE 5 (or KDE Plasma 5 as the desktop prefers to be called) is a much sleeker animal. In our tests it did use up a tiny bit more memory than Cinnamon, and slightly more than Xfce and MATE, but what’s a hundred or so megabytes
between friends? It makes not one iota of difference once you start memoryslayer Chromium. Plasma is certainly configurable, but in a way that is not overbearing. Take the default, medium-weight launcher menu (at the bottom-left, as it should be). Right-click it and select Show Alternatives. You will see it can be swapped for a modern, full-screen launcher (sort of like Gnome) or a more classic cascading menu design.
KDE comes with its own graphical application store called Discover (one of few KDE apps not to capitalise on any opportunity for an unnecessary letter K). You’ll find this already pinned to the favourites menu, and you might also prefer it to Mint’s native Software Manager. One thing you’ll want to do is sort out Flatpak support in Discover. Fire up a terminal (try the Konsole application) and run:
$ sudo apt install plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
You can now, after restarting Discover, browse FlatHub (or any other Flatpak repos) by adding them via the Settings option at the bottom right. Just click Show Contents to the right of the repo name. Flatpak is a much more decentralised idea than Snaps; anyone can set up their own Flatpak repository, but the only Snap outlet in town is Canonical’s Snapcraft. Both forms are potentially risky though, since there’s little to stop a scoundrel uploading a rogue Flatpak or Snap. And while both have some sandboxing capabilities we have no compunction to endorse the downloading of random binaries. Popular applications are easy to spot on FlatHub and common Snap packages have a reassuring ‘Verified’ badge.
We mentioned that Wayland isn’t explicitly supported by any of the Mint desktops, but that is changing. In the latest MATE release a great deal of the desktop now works natively with Wayland, so if you switch the Marco window manager for Compton then you’re well on your way to display protocol future. Xfce 4.18 plans to introduce support, though that may be a long way off. So it’s really desktops, rather than distros, that enable Wayland – and as luck would have it KDE Plasma has support built in to its Kwin window manager. There’s just a couple of packages to pull in to bring it to life:
$ sudo apt install plasma-workspace-wayland
Now if you log out, a new session called Plasma (Wayland) will be available from the menu. The Plasma experience on Wayland has come a long way this year. We’re told it even works with the proprietary Nvidia driver now.
One thing that might strike you as jarring about Plasma in general is that your session is automatically saved. If you prefer to start each time without all those stray terminals and whatever else you left open, go to Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Desktop Session.