Install the KDE Desktop environment on ArchLinux

KDE is one of the many desktop environments that we can have for our Linux operating system, this environment is among the most popular and used by a large part of the Linux community, Due to its great acceptance, a large number of distributions have given it a space creating versions with this environment installed by default.

In this space, I will show you how to install KDE Plasma on our Arch Linux system, the method that I will show you here is also valid for its derivatives.

Note: (Only for those who have or are going to install Arch Linux) Before going to the installation process, it is essential to already have our basic environment, which is Xorg, so if you have not done it yet, I recommend go through this guide.

Now alone we must type the following commands In order to install Plasma on our system, if we want to install KDE Frameworks 5 together with its libraries and software frameworks, we key the following:

pacman -S kf5 kf5-aids

If we only want to install the KDE 5 Plasma environment with the basic applications what we must type is the following:

pacman -S plasma kdebase kdegraphics-ksnapshot gwenview

If you don't want the Plasma Media Center

pacman -R plasma-mediacenter

We must install the ttf-freefont which includes Freefont Serif, Sans and Mono Truetype fonts, without these fonts KDE will only display black screen with mouse cursor

pacman -Sttf-freefont

At the end we must install our login manager, this applies only if you install the basic packages:

pacman -S sddm sddm-kcm

And we enable it with the following command:

systemctl enable sddm

As final process we must install the essential packages to enable audio support in KDE Plasma 5

pacman -S alsa-utils pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa libcanberra-pulse libcanberra-gstreamer jack2-dbus

Without further ado, you just have to restart your system so that you can see the changes reflected, we do this with the following command:

sudo reboot