KDE Plasma is a desktop environment provided by the KDE development team for Linux. It is very popular due to its effects, exquisite graphic elements and wide range of applications. The earlier Plasma was the default graphical user interface for CentOS, but with the use of CentOS 8, it has been converted to GNOME. Therefore, fans of Kde Plasma miss its death very much and hope to restore it to their operating system. In this guide, we will show the steps to easily install it on CentOS 8.
Steps to install KDE Plasma workspace GUI on CentOS 8
In fact, why do we need to create this tutorial, because this beautiful Linux desktop environment is no longer available in the official repositories of CentOS 8 or RHEL 8. Therefore, we need to add the EPEL repo before we can get the Plasma desktop. We did this tutorial on CentOS 8 server without GUI interface, I mean it is running on CLI. However, you can also use this command in GNOME running CentOS Linux.
1. Add EPEL repository
The first thing we need is the epel repository, which contains hundreds of the latest software packages, which are not available in the official representative office of this Linux system.
- Install EPEL repository on CentOS 8 Linux
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
2. Update the system
After adding the repository, we need to refresh the cache and rebuild it again using the update command. It will also update all available software packages on the system.
- System package update
dnf update
3. Install KDE Plasma Desktop on CentOS 8
With the repository set up, it's time to run a command that will enable Power Tools on CentOS and install Plasma 5 Desktop with X base.
dnf --enablerepo=epel,PowerTools group -y install "KDE Plasma Workspaces" "base-x"
4. Start KDE
For CLI users - if you directly want to start and test the installed graphical user interface, you just need to run it.
echo "exec /usr/bin/startkde" >> ~/.xinitrc
startx
But the problem is that as long as you start a server or desktop without a graphical user interface to get the KDE GUI, you must log in and then run the command: the advantage of startx is that we can delete it by performing further steps.
(Optional) For GUI . These people are already using the GNOME version and want to log in as KDE. Just log out or restart the system, and then select the installed device from the Gear icon to switch the desktop environment.
4. Set the default target system
Therefore, this step and the upcoming steps are especially suitable for users who use the command line interface on their own machine and then install KDE on it. So if you set the default server system boot in the CLI to GUI, that would be great. So every time you only boot to the GUI.
systemctl set-default graphical.target
ll /etc/systemd/system/default.target
systemctl enable sddm
If a black screen appears, press Ctrl + Alt + F2 on the KDE login screen and type: startx