KDE Plasma setup

Here is a few tips that I personally use when I setup KDE Plasma on a fresh installation. This is

You might have a different taste, but it gives you a small view on how much can be configured in KDE Plasma. This could also be seem as a quick start guide, before you'll spend more time in the settings to customize to your taste.

Bottom panel

This panel list all opened or pinned applications, in additions to a OS features information, such as Wifi state, bluetooth, battery level, sound, clipboard...

Changing the panel style

You can right click on the panel to access this option.

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At the right, you'll have a few options to change the look. I choose "Auto hide", a smaller size of 36, and disable Floating.

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Adding custom widgets

I'm regularly checking the CPU usage, the RAM usage and the disk usage. Instead of opening htop or lsblk -fm all the time to do it, I really like having pie charts directly displayed in this panel.

Again, you can right click on the panel to access this option. There is a big list of widgets to add.

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If you want to customize the appearance of a given widget, right click on it and choose "Configure ...".

To show the free space bytes instead of the total usage in percent, I had to configure this Disk space widget like this. It's important to precise the disk you want to include (here it is named fedora_sxp).

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Note: widgets can be resized by clicking on their border :)

Global shortcuts

It is possible to have global shortcuts such as Meta+k to open your terminal. If you have a few apps or commands you frequently need to run, this is VERY useful !

Under System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Add New -> Command or Script... -> Give the command, given an arbitrary name useful to yourself -> Add -> and assign a shortcut.

Shortcuts I personally use

  1. Meta+k to open Kitty (just the command kitty)
  2. Meta+s to open flameshot gui
  3. Meta+d to open dme
  4. Meta+o to open op (a Fish function to quickly open an important course file)