KDE Plasma
A flexible, customisable desktop environment.
KDE Plasma takes the opposite philosophy to GNOME: nearly every aspect of the desktop is configurable, from panel layout and widgets to window-manager keybindings and visual effects. The System Settings app exposes hundreds of options across dozens of categories, and the desktop's "activities" feature lets users maintain multiple distinct configurations of widgets and panels for different workflows.
Plasma is built on Qt and KDE Frameworks, and ships alongside a large catalogue of KDE-branded applications: Dolphin (file manager), Konsole (terminal), Kate (text editor), Gwenview (image viewer), Okular (document viewer), and many more. KWin, the window manager, supports both X11 and Wayland sessions and is one of the more featureful Wayland compositors among major desktops.
The KDE community is one of the longest-running free-software projects, dating to 1996 when Matthias Ettrich started the "Kool Desktop Environment" to provide a coherent free desktop. KDE Plasma is the default on KDE neon, Kubuntu, openSUSE KDE, Fedora KDE Spin, Manjaro KDE, and many other distributions. Recent Plasma 6 releases (2024) brought a substantial Qt 6 / KF6 migration that has been remarkably smooth given the scope.
License: GPL-2.0-or-later (varies by component)
Category: Desktop
Website: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
Install
Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop Fedora: sudo dnf install @kde-desktop Arch: sudo pacman -S plasma kde-applications
Authors
- KDE community