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What is KDE?
The KDE Community is an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience, offering an advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment and a platform to easily build new applications upon. 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.
You can find information about KDE's software in Debian from the Debian Qt/KDE maintainers website.
DebianSqueeze contains KDE's 4.4.5 release.
DebianWheezy contains KDE Platform, Applications and Workspaces (Plasma) 4.8.4 with KDE PIM 4.4.11.
DebianJessie contains the KDE Platform and Applications 4.14.0 and KDE Workspaces (Plasma) 4.11.13. Information for users of KDE with Jessie
DebianStretch contains the KDE Frameworks 4.14.10, Plasma 5.4 and Applications 15.04
DebianUnstable contains the KDE Frameworks 5.13, Plasma 5.4 and Applications 15.04
Installation
There are different options to install KDE Plasma Desktop in Debian:
How to install |
Description |
|
"KDE Plasma Desktop" |
Debian's selection of applications |
|
KDE (Full release of workspace, applications and framework) |
kde-full package |
The standard/upstream release |
KDE (Debian selected common stuff for workspace, applications and framework) |
kde-standard package |
A debian selection of common things |
KDE Plasma Desktop |
kde-plasma-desktop package |
This is a minimalist plasma desktop |
KDE Plasma Netbook |
kde-plasma-netbook package |
This is a minimalist plasma netbook |
Watch out recommended packages (i.e packages dependencies) !
(you might or might not want to install them).
Installing "KDE Plasma Desktop" task
KDE Plasma Desktop task is what is installed by Debian-Installer's Desktop "task". You can choose this by going to "Advanced Options" => "Alternative Desktop Environments" => "KDE" in the installer menu (or by typing install desktop=kde at DebianInstaller CD prompt).
To install KDE later, first make sure that tasksel and aptitude are installed:
apt-get install aptitude tasksel
Then, install the kde-desktop task:
aptitude install ~t^desktop$ ~t^kde-desktop$
(This is what DebianInstaller would have installed in a new system, but you might want/need to uninstall the current display manager).
Building KF5/Plasma from source
For testing new versions or helping with upstream development it can be helpful to compile (parts of) KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 5, KDE Applications including KDEPIM from source.
For that see upstream notes.
I found that specifically placing the following script into ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env and chmod +x it works for me:
~/.config/plasma-workspace/env> cat kdedirs.sh #!/bin/bash export KF5=/home/kde/install export QTDIR=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5 export PATH=$KF5/bin:$QTDIR/bin:$PATH export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$KF5/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/plugins:$QTDIR/plugins:$QT_PLUGIN_PATH export QML2_IMPORT_PATH=$KF5/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qml:$QTDIR/qml export XDG_DATA_DIRS=$KF5/share:/usr/share export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=$KF5/etc/xdg:/etc/xdg export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$KF5/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Although in upstream Frameworks runtime setup documentation it is not recommended to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH this is what works here. It still uses the system wide libraries for anything that is not self-built.
The appearance of GTK-applications in Plasma
To get gtk-applications look native in Plasma you need install these packages and configure appearance of them through System Settings > Application appearance.
KDE configuration module for GTK+ 2/3.x style selection |
|
Oxygen widget theme for GTK2+-based applications |
|
Oxygen widget theme for GTK3+-based applications (Debian Wheezy) |