Wiki

• FrontPage
• RecentChanges
• FindPage
• HelpContents
• KDE

Translation(s): English - Español - Português (Brasil) - Français - Italiano - Русский - 简体中文

What is KDE?

The KDE Community is an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience. KDE offers an advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment and a platform to build new applications. We have a strong focus on finding innovative solutions to old and new problems, creating a vibrant atmosphere open for experimentation.

KDE's software in Debian

Plasma by KDE is one of the DesktopEnvironment options in the DebianDesktopHowTo.

Information about KDE's software in Debian is available from the Debian Qt/KDE maintainers website.

• DebianBookworm contains the KDE Frameworks 5.103, KDE Plasma 5.27.5, and KDE Gear 22.12

• DebianTrixie contains the KDE Frameworks 6.13 & 5.116, KDE Plasma 6.3, KDE PIM 24.12 and the rest of KDE Gear 25.04

• DebianUnstable contains the KDE Frameworks 6.13 & 5.116, KDE Plasma 6.3, KDE PIM 24.12 and the rest of KDE Gear 25.04

Installation

There are different options to install the KDE Plasma Desktop in Debian:

• Watch out for recommended packages (that is, optional package dependencies)!
  They are installed by default, but you might not want them.
  apt option --no-install-recommends and aptitude option --without-recommends can help with this.

Installing the "KDE Plasma Desktop" task

You can install KDE Plasma and its default set of applications in Debian, even after the initial system installation, by installing the KDE Plasma Desktop "task": task-kde-desktop.

In this case, the "task" is a metapackage that contains no files of its own, but it depends on all of the relevant KDE packages. Installing it will consequentially install all of those dependencies.

If you prefer to uninstall everything it added later, you can remove the task-kde-desktop package you installed, then run the apt autoremove command. This command removes all packages on your system that weren't manually installed and aren't a dependency of any other package. This will, in our case, remove all of the packages that were brought in by task-kde-desktop, as it no longer depends on them.

Using self-built (parts) of KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 5, KDE Applications

See Using self-built (parts) of KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 5, KDE Applications.

Plasma 6

See Plasma 6 Notes.

Making GNOME/GTK applications look natural

Applications built using GTK, often Gnome applications, may look unfitting in KDE Plasma as they use different GUI toolkits. To smooth over the differences, KDE's default Breeze theme also has a GTK version which can be added by installing the breeze-gtk-theme package.

To set the GTK theme that's used, install the kde-config-gtk-style and kde-config-gtk-style-preview packages. After installation, you can find the section to configure GTK themes in the Application Style section of your system settings application. This may appear either as a tab or as a button labelled "Configure GNOME/GTK Application Style..." You'll likely want to set both the GTK2 and GTK3 theme to Breeze or Breeze-Dark.

Troubleshooting and tips

Performance/Rendering issues

If you're having issues with performance or rendering bugs, you may look for the Compositor section of your system settings. Changing the "Rendering backend" to XRender can often improve performance and stability, especially on NVIDIA cards using the proprietary driver. However, this will disable some desktop effects.

On extremely low-end systems, you can use the Alt-Shift-F12 keyboard shortcut to disable the compositor completely. This disables all effects and may introduce screen-tearing, but is much faster on older or cheaper systems. In the relevant section of your settings, there is also a checkbox to not enable the compositor on startup, which will automate this process on future boots.

Clashing With GNOME (GTK)

If you have graphical issues with GNOME (or any other GTK-based application) that are likely to have been caused by KDE, such as dark themes not applying to text or other UI elements, causing some of the system to be unusable, you can set another GTK theme in KDE "System Settings/GNOME Application Style (GTK)".

If you select the dark theme that you use on GNOME, it will apply fine on it.

On older versions, you may try editing the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css file

Comment out the "@import 'colors.css';" line by adding a # character before it, so that the line looks like:

   1 # @import 'colors.css';

Ugly login screen

The default Debian theme for SDDM, KDE's display manager/login screen, may seem a little antiquated. You can install the kde-config-sddm and sddm-theme-debian-breeze packages to add the more modern Breeze theme for SDDM, which you can then set it to use in the Login Screen (SDDM) section of your system settings. This will use the default KDE wallpaper by default. However, you can set a custom background in this screen as well.

Wayland, touchscreens, autorotation, hi-DPI

From Debian 12 (Bookworm) onwards, Plasma uses Wayland by default. If Wayland is not installed, install plasma-workspace-wayland package. Compared to KDE on Xorg, Wayland has much better support for touchscreens (including an onscreen keyboard that automatically comes up when selecting a text field), autorotation on tablets, and automatic configuration support for hiDPI monitors, even on complex multi-monitor setups with different resolutions.

Wayland is considered production stable. However, there are still known issues on which the KDE team is still working.

Drawing tablets

Installing the kde-config-tablet package will add a section to the system settings for configuring drawing tablets and a system tray applet for quickly changing settings. If your tablet isn't automatically detected, it also includes a helper tool called "Wacom Tablet finder" to assist you in adding the proper configuration for it.

Wacom drawing tablets, by far, have the best support both in KDE and Linux. Other brands may be supported to varying degrees, but there is much less of a guarantee compared to Wacom, which can generally be expected to work without issue.

Configuring the screenlocker

Installing the kde-config-screenlocker package allows configuring the screenlocker similarly to SDDM. This package adds a Screen Locking section to your system settings where you can configure things like the keyboard shortcut to lock the screen, the background image, the media controls, the no-password grace period after locking, and when the system should lock itself.

Despite their similarities, SDDM does not manage the screenlocker.

KDE/Breeze boot splash

For greater integration with your KDE Plasma desktop, you may also want to set your boot splash to Breeze so that it matches the rest of your system. For details, including KDE-specific notes where relevant, see plymouth. In short, you can add Breeze theme for Plymouth by installing the plymouth-theme-breeze package, then add a section to your system settings for setting the boot splash by installing the kde-config-plymouth package.

Color profiles and color management

The colord-kde package provides a Color Corrections section to your system settings that allows you to calibrate your display devices to use a specific color profile, either imported or from a preset list. This is especially useful for graphic artists and users who work in the print industry.

Native LibreOffice icons and theming

The libreoffice-plasma package allows LibreOffice to match your Plasma environment when launched from KDE Plasma, including native Qt dialogs for opening and saving files.

If you're using the Breeze Dark theme, the icons may have poor contrast. Go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View > Icon style, and change the icon style to Breeze (Dark).

Enable file search

Baloo file indexer is disabled by default in Debian. To enable it go to Search > File Search in system settings or execute

   1 balooctl enable

Reset your KDE Plasma configuration to defaults

If something has gone terribly wrong or you just want a clean slate, cd into ~/.config in your terminal and run:

   1 for j in plasma*; do mv -- "$j" "${j%}.bak"; done

This renames all Plasma-related configuration files to add the .bak extension to the end, making Plasma unable to find them, and forcing it to regenerate them from defaults. This is a safe way to return to your default configuration without outright deleting any files.

Show debugging information

When reporting a bug with KDE, or asking for support in the community, you may want to attach information about your environment. The easiest and most comprehensive way to do this is to run:

   1 qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin supportInformation

Which will print off a long list of useful support information to include in your bug report. Given the size of this output, you're recommended to upload it to https://paste.debian.net/ and send the link instead of pasting the entire text into wherever you're requesting support.

See also

• Interested in helping?

• KDE Multimedia

• Help cleaning the mail archives from Spam

CategoryDesktopEnvironment | CategorySoftware