KDE - Alpine Linux
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From Alpine Linux
KDE Plasma screenshot.
Plasma
is the desktop environment from
KDE
, a software project comprising of a collection of libraries known as
KDE Frameworks
, and several applications known as
KDE Applications
. Their
UserBase wiki
has detailed information about most KDE Applications.
Prerequisites
Tip:
Everything but the first two and last two, are automatically handled if Plasma desktop is installed using
setup-desktop
Internet
connectivity
, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
Install appropriate
Graphics driver
drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur when starting your desktop.
non-root user account
with appropriate
groups for desktop usage
The
community repository must be enabled
Set up
eudev
Install and enable
D-Bus
. Without D-Bus, icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.
Enable
Elogind
service with
polkit
If you need Xwayland and
Xorg
, run
setup-xorg-base
Installation
Note:
The
plasma-desktop-meta
package, which is used by
setup-desktop
, isn't available for the
armhf
or
s390x
architectures
. However, the rest of Plasma may be installed separately to potentially get a functional desktop.
setup-desktop
The Alpine Linux script for quickly
setting up a desktop
is:
# setup-desktop
On running the above command, you will be prompted to select a desktop environment.
Which desktop environment? ('gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway', 'lxqt' or 'none') [none]
Once you have chosen a desktop environment, this script installs the chosen desktop along with necessary packages,
firefox
browser (which can be modified by setting up the BROWSER variable) and adds necessary services to run on startup. You can reboot when complete, and the system will boot into a graphical login screen with the chosen desktop environment, except for
sway
. To view the packages installed by the script:
$ cat /usr/sbin/setup-desktop
When Plasma is chosen, the above script additionally installs
PipeWire
for audio and
SDDM
as display manager.
Manual
The following command will install the Plasma desktop as specified by the plasma metapackage, including the
sddm
display manager and other assorted niceties.
# apk add
plasma-desktop-meta
Note:
polkit
and
udev
are optional services for authentication and device management respectively. While KDE will function without these services enabled, some functionality may be missing or incomplete.
KDE Applications
To install the full set of KDE Applications, install
kde-applications
. You can also choose to install a smaller set of applications by installing any of the subpackages:
Note:
For the
ppc64le
or
s390x
architectures
, all
kde-applications*
packages are only available in
Edge
, from the community repository (verified in December 2025).
kde-applications-accessibility
kde-applications-admin
kde-applications-base
kde-applications-edu
kde-applications-games
kde-applications-graphics
kde-applications-multimedia
kde-applications-network
kde-applications-pim
kde-applications-sdk
kde-applications-utils
kde-applications-webdev
Starting Plasma
Plasma can be started using a display manager or from the console.
Using a display manager
When Plasma is installed via the plasma meta-package, the display manager is set up using sddm.
Make sure you enable and start the SDDM service.
# rc-update add sddm
# rc-service sddm start
Select
Plasma
to launch a new session in Wayland
Select
Plasma (X11)
to launch a new session in Xorg
From the console
For the Wayland session run:
$ XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland
The Xorg session can be launched by installing
xinit
and appending
exec startplasma-x11
to your
.xinitrc
file. To start X:
$ xinit
Discover
Discover
is the application installer from KDE. The alpine linux package
discover
is automatically installed if
plasma-desktop-meta
package is installed or if
setup-desktop
is used to install Plasma.
Install the packages
discover-backend-apk
and
discover-backend-flatpak
to use Discover as a graphical interface to
Alpine Package Keeper
and
Flatpak
respectively.
Troubleshooting
HiDPI Scaling
When using high resolution screens, e.g. 4K, you might need to apply scaling so the fonts and windows are not too small.
In order to achieve this you can open
Settings -> Display and Monitor
and change the slider under
Global Scale
to an appropriate value.
You can also change the mouse cursor and icon size under
Settings -> Appearance
If your taskbar and window decorations are still too small, you might want to create the file
~/.xprofile
to define the
PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING
environment variable:
export PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1
After creating this file, you may need to restart your session to apply this modification.
Inputs not Working
All stated prerequisites should be sufficient to install
Plasma
, but
certain reports
signal that
xf86-input-libinput
corrected some situations where inputs did not respond in Wayland. That package is an X11 wrapper for libinput and therefore not fully adequate in Wayland; rather,
libinput-libs
may be more appropriate. Further testing, reports and contributions are encouraged, if the issue is encountered.
To bypass unresponsive inputs, the
libinput-libs
package would require being installed in a
chroot
hosted on another installation.
See also
Post installation
Flatpak
KDE - Archwiki
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Category
Desktop Environments