Okay, now you know what I’m gonna talk about. I won’t give much of details about the features. I will just tell you how to install and some links to read more.
Impressed??? Let’s install…
Install
Installation is so simple. Just install kf5 and kf5-aids via official repositories.
sudo pacman -S kf5 kf5-aids
And then install the plasma desktop via AUR.
sudo packer -S plasma-desktop
It may a while to build the package.
Alternative installation method is to install from KDE unstable releases.
sudo pacman -S plasma-next
Now logout and select the environment as Plasma and you’re ready to go.
Note
But you may notice there are a very small amount of widgets there. Just be patient for a while, since this is just released.
But network applet is a compulsory one which you can live without. You have to install the new version of plasma-nm via AUR.
sudo packer -S plasma-nm
Features
The most special feature I saw is the smooth rendering of graphics and effects. KDE people surely had put a great effort to optimize that.
If you want to test the effects, there is a new widget called Shader Test. Install it and put it on the desktop to see how smooth those rendering is. 😉
And another noticable change is, Konqueror is the default file browser now, not Dolphin.
I’m not going to talk anymore about this and you better try it out to feel it. If you really need to know more, just follow the below links.
https://dot.kde.org/2014/07/15/plasma-5.0
http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0-beta2/
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Packages
EDIT:
Conflict with KDE 4
As for the Arch Wiki “Plasma 5 is not co-installable with KDE 4 Workspace. If you install it you will be prompted to remove kdebase-workspace“. However now I’m using both KDE 4 and KDE 5, since I have ignored to install kwin.
Anyhow, if someone is struggling with this matter, you can install KDE 5 by removing kdebase-workspace. Then you won’t be having kdm anymore, and will need to install another display manager. Arch wiki suggests sddm from AUR instead of kdm.
As far as I know, as pointed in https://dot.kde.org/2014/07/15/plasma-5.0 this is no a beta but I final release. Isn’t it?
Opps… My bad.. Thanks for your comment.. I edited that.. (y)
I’m a former Gnome user and I’d like to install KDE Plasma 5. However building KDE parts from AUR sounds a bit too “experimental” for everyday use, so I think I’ll wait for all components to become stabler and available in the official repos…
I was looking at the release schedule at https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5 and was wondering which one it supposed to be the final (feature complete) release date?
Thanks
Thanks for the concern..
I did build it from AUR and didn’t find any significant errors or lags. Of course there is a lack of features such as widgets. Even I couldn’t find an actual release date. As it seems, v5 is the release and others are beta versions. I’m not quite sure about that.
But I will keep everyone updated if I found any news. 🙂
Thanks! I was unable to start it. Missed plasma-desktop via arch wiki. Love it.
Have you enabled kdm?
$ sudo systemctl enable kdm
Running packer with sudo is bad idea because security issues. Run packer as a normal user and after building process it will install the package with sudo pacman -U and will ask you the root password.
Yes, there is an issue of using
sudowithpacker, but I haven’t faced any such problem when installing with packer. Anyhow, it’s more secure to build the package using a normal user and then usesudo pacman -U, but you may have to find the built package in temp folders.Anyway, thank you for your idea.
Yes, you’re right, the built packages are put into the /tmp folder which is mounted in a tmpfs by default. But editing /usr/bin/packer you can change this by setting a custom build directory in the aurinstall function. See this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=88115&p=21
After following these instructions, I am no longer able to boot into KDE, because it seems that KDM has been uninstalled. The only way to reinstall KDM would be to install KDM base, but that then causes a dependency conflict. Any advice?
Hi,
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I myself also installed KD5 while having KDE 4, and now I have both.
But my assumption is you installed kwin and it removed other dependencies. You need kde-base to run kdm for sure. You can try uninstalling kwin and try again. But I do not guarantee that it would work.
I will look further and let you know if I find anything. 🙂
Hi,
I hope that I’ve found the remedy. There is a dependency conflict and it’s really hard to avoid. The reason is “Plasma 5 is not coinstallable with KDE 4 Workspace. If you install it you will be prompted to remove kdebase-workspace” as for the Arch Wiki. That’s why
kdmis not available anymore. So the solution is to use another Display Manager such asssdm.ssdmis available in AUR and said to be more compatible with KDE 5, if you like you can try another one likelxdm,gdmetc. See the full list at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/display_managerHope this helps.
I have installed sddm, kf5 and kf5-aids. Now I am trying to install plasma-desktop, plasma-nm, but it says “Dependency `kwayland’ of `plasma-desktop’ does not exist.” Can you tell me why is it so?
Hi,
The reason is that
kwaylandhas a dependency forkwin, and it had a dependency forplasma-desktop. That’s why you’re getting this error. There is an option that you can use another window manager apart fromkwin, but I won’t suggest that. if you still want to, you can try installingi3as mentioned here.Hey I installed the plasma-next as you suggested, but when I login in sddm there is no plasma/plasma-desktop entry in list …. any pointers thanks
Seems like your
plasma-dektopis not installed properly. What are the packages that you’ve installed/removed ?[…] have installed KDE Plasma 5, as I mentioned in my previous post. I could use it without any problem, even though I have to ignore many packages while updating my […]
It’s sddm, not ssdm. This thing made me crazy for one hour :))
OMG.. Such a damn typo that is. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.
[…] https://sudopacman.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/kde5/ […]