KDE Plasma

Base Plasma Packages

Base KDE Plasma packages for the full Plasma experience. Bundle with other packages to prevent package conflicts providing the same functionality.

TIP: Include any and all packages you want installed in a list to pacman. That way pacman will resolve package dependencies correctly and not install packages that would cause conflicts with other packages later on in the setup; e.g. the plasma group installs pulseaudio as a dependency of plasma-pa, but pulseaudio and pipewire (see below) are conflicting packages, meaning they can't both be installed at the same time prompting you to remove one or the other. Explicitly selected packages take precedence over packages auto-selected via dependencies.

pacman -S plasma plasma-wayland-session kde-applications

Video Acceleration

Drivers for hardware accelerated desktop rendering, improving performance and fidelity.

Intel

pacman -S mesa vulkan-intel intel-media-driver libva-intel-driver
yay -S intel-hybrid-codec-driver

AMDGPU

pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu libva-mesa-driver vulkan-radeon amdvlk

Nvidia

Nouveau open source driver

pacman -S libva-mesa-driver mesa-vdpau
yay -S nouveau-fw

Proprietary driver

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils # Includes Vulkan driver

Audio

Use PipeWire as a more current and modern low-latency sound server. Also better suited for WebRTC screen sharing and recording in Wayland sessions (GNOME uses Wayland by default)

pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack pipewire-alsa wireplumber

Bluetooth

pacman -S bluez bluez-utils
systemctl enable bluetooth

Spell Checking

pacman -S hunspell hunspell-de hunspell-en_US hyphen hyphen-de

Printing

pacman -S cups logrotate system-config-printer
systemctl enable cups
systemctl enable logrotate.timer

Firefox

pacman -S firefox firefox-i18n-de
echo "MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1" >> /etc/environment
echo "MOZ_WEBRENDER=1" >> /etc/environment

Alternatively, navigate to about:config and set gfx.webrender.all to true to enable WebRender compositor.

Plasma Integration

yay -S firefox-extension-plasma-integration

Hardware Decoding

Set the following in about:config

Setting key	Value
`media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled`	`true`
`media.ffvpx.enabled`	`false`
`media.rdd-vpx.enabled`	`false`
`media.navigator.mediadatadecoder_vpx_enabled`	`true`

Google Chrome

yay -S google-chrome

Tweaks

To enable hardware accelerated video decoding (with open source drivers) create a file at ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf and add the following line in it:

--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder

Furthermore, visit chrome://flags and set the following options to further tweak performance (use the search field to filter):

Setting key	Value
`#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer`	`Enabled`
`#enable-gpu-rasterization`	`Enabled`
`#enable-zero-copy`	`Enabled`
`#ozone-platform-hint`	`Auto`

Setting up display manager

Start SDDM on boot

Start the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) on boot to be presented with a graphical login screen.

systemctl enable sddm

Set Keymap for SDDM

NOTE: Executing this command while chrooted into an installation will produce an error that the locale could not be found. Set after rebooting the system, press CTRL + ALT + F3 when SDDM shows up (or any F-key between 2 and 7) to switch tty, log in via the command line and execute the command as root.

localectl set-x11-keymap de

Generate well-known user directories

xdg-user-dirs-update

Misc additional packages

Additional packages you might want:

Name	Description
`freerdp`	Support for the Remote Desktop Protocol used for remote login to MS Windows machines
`kimageformats`	Support for additional image formats in Dolphin and Gwenview
`ksshaskpass`	`ssh-add` helper that uses kwallet and kpassworddialog
`fwupd`	Firmware update manager; allows UEFI capsule updates in Discover if supported by firmware
`packagekit-qt5`	Manage Arch packages in Discover

pacman -S freerdp kimageformats ksshaskpass fwupd packagekit-qt5