Moving from Gnome to KDE

Does anyone have any advice on migrating an EndeavourOS installation from Gnome to KDE?

Is it as simple as:

Ctrl + Alt + F3

sudo su -
pacman -Rcnsu gnome gnome-extra
pacman -S plasma
reboot

Possibly also disabling GDM & enabling SDDM.

I’m debating whether it’s too much effort, and whether waiting for my next clean install would be better.

No, it is a bit more complicated than that, but not too much.

I haven’t tested this but I think it would be something closer to this:

sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -Rcsn gnome gnome-extras
sudo pacman -S networkmanager
sudo pacman -S plasma dolphin konsole
sudo systemctl enable sddm.service --force

I am not sure what the state of your network will be after removing and reinstalling networkmanager. You might have to start/restart the service in there.

Make sure you have a copy of the networkmanager package in your cache. If not, download it before you start.

Also, this is a pretty minimal kde install. You will probably want to add applications to suit your preferences after that.

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For me, personally I found it was cleaner to just do a fresh reinstall when trying to go from one of the big DEs to another. There’s just too many little bits.

But if you want to try @dalto’s got the right idea

Ah… that’s not too bad. Are there any residual Gnome config files that I should remove?

I would do that, but I spent ages faffing with my current BTRFS setup, and I’m reluctant to do it again any time soon.

Yes, basically all the gnome config in your home directory will be left behind. The package manager won’t touch any of that.

There is no doubt it is cleaner to reinstall. Alternatively, after removing gnome and installing plasma you could either create a new user account or purge everything from the existing account.

Cool… done. On to personalising.

Thank you all!

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A heads up: Removing Gnome removes Network Manager.

Ta. Thankfully, dalto mentioned that one. Would probably have missed it otherwise.

If you want to pull in many of the KDE apps, you could also install kde-applications (which includes Dolpin and Plasma).

If you’ve set any overrides for QT theming, eg using qt5ct, in the GNOME environment, you should remove those because KDE will conflict with them, and you’ll get all your QT apps looking janky

I looked at the various kde-* meta-packages, but decided on a strategy using https://apps.kde.org/ as a shopping list to pick and choose from.

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Didn’t know about that website; cool!

Just to be clear, kde-applications has over 150 applications and nearly 300 packages. It is the “kitchen sink” approach to installing kde.

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Quite a lot, that is!

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When i installed it the Arch way my pacstrap included only base, base-devel, linux, linux firmware, plasma, sddm, firefox, nano, man, amd-ucode, grub, efibootmgr, konsole, dolphin

Then i installed what i wanted after.

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Replace nano with vim and that’s pretty much my list as well.

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