Process of installing KDE Plasma alongside GNOME?

[Smokus]

Heya all, again me and my probably dumb/obvious questions.

I currently use GNOME Wayland, and like it so far, however I wish to make use of FreeSync, and sadly the mutter-vrr package hasn’t been updated for GNOME 43 (porting isn’t trivial according to the package maintainer), thus I am unable to use VRR on GNOME.

KDE Plasma however has support for it already. So I would like to try out KDE. I mainly wish to install it alongside GNOME, set it up exactly like my current GNOME setup looks like (since it’s very customizable, it should be doable).

I am wondering what exactly I need to do / install to get it working.

I want to only use Wayland session.
I currently on GNOME use Terminal, zsh with powerlvl10k theme for it:

If I switch to KDE, will those “customizations” of Terminal carry over, or will I be forced to use Konsole?

[Locutus]

ZSH is not distro specific. That said if you have the space install the OS you want with KDE next to the one you have with Gnome. Never a good idea to have two different desktops installed in the same OS, they can interfere with each other.

[limotux]

@Smokus

I mainly wish to install it alongside GNOME

@Locutus

Never a good idea to have two different desktops installed in the same OS, they can interfere with each other.

If you have to use two desktops it is better to make a different user for each desktop. Never use same user for more than one desktop.
I hope this helps.
(My experience as well, KDE is -to my experience- much more customizable… I like it, just my personal taste. No offence intended. Gnome looks great by the way)

[mrvictory]

Create a new user, with sudo privileges if you desire. Then install KDE Plasma and its Wayland session.

sudo pacman -S plasma-meta plasma-wayland-session

Log out, pick your new user and choose Plasma (Wayland) session. Don’t login to both GNOME and Plasma from the same user.

[dalto]

@Smokus

If I switch to KDE, will those “customizations” of Terminal carry over, or will I be forced to use Konsole?

Those are part of your shell, not the terminal. They should work the same in konsole as gnome terminal.

That being said, you can continue to use gnome terminal in plasma if you want to.

[Locutus]

[quote=“limotux, post:3, topic:34519”]

@Locutus

Never a good idea to have two different desktops installed in the same OS, they can interfere with each other. If you have to use two desktops it is better to make a different user for each desktop. Never use same user for more than one desktop.
I hope this helps.
(My experience as well, KDE is -to my experience- much more customizable… I like it, just my personal taste. No offence intended. Gnome looks great by the way)

Make sure you quote me correctly next time. The truth of the matter is if you want to run more than one desktop environment do separate installs of the Linux distro you want to use. Even creating a separate user for the second desktop environment can cause issues for both users.

[limotux]

@Locutus

Make sure you quote me correctly next time.

Sorry, seems like I made a typing mistake that made it look this way.’
I will try to fix it.