Suggestion for KDE installation

Upon my first install with KDE, moving from XFCE, I noticed that the installed only has the options to install the “kde-(utilities/system)-meta” which is good since I need the konsole / ark / dolphin that it includes but it also installs bunch of other packages I have no intention of using.

I ended up having to remove them especially with the utilities as I only use 2 packages from it, the system is rather small since it uses only 4 packages, all that could be used so i would have no issue if it remains.

My main suggestion is to remove the metas and directly install the commonly used packages from those metas, as I would need to arch-chroot into the system after the install to get ark / konsole without needing to install the utilities meta.

Otherwise, It is a very nice distro and I can’t wait to see how endeavour os improve as I really like the fact I get updates direct from Arch without holding them back for “stability”

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Hi @ElderKarr
Welcome to EndeavourOS and its forum!

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Welcome to the forum.

This is a good suggestion, in my opinion.

KDE meta packages are quite bloated*. For example, Discover should not be in any default KDE installation on an Arch-based distro.

I just looked at it, Discover is part of the plasma-meta which is not by default on EndeavourOS KDE install. That’s good (but my example is bad :slight_smile: ). Still, Discover is included by default (that’s bad).


* When I say “bloated”, I mean that in relative terms, of course. I’m not comparing it to, say, a Kubuntu install.

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Full agree this!

Welcome in our purple company!

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If you want to know what is in each of the KDE meta packages you can check them all out here:

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=kde+meta

I believe if you want all of the KDE meta packages you would use applications-meta and that’s like the meta of metas.

If don’t want any of them and only bits and pieces, then you need to go thru and install per diem. That’s the glory/burden of Arch. You are the master of your own machine.

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Also a handy little feature in pacman is the option to exclude packages in groups. For example:

Enter a selection (default=all): ^5-8 ^2

You can probably decouple that question from Arch. Do you want to be an distribution that provides a graphical package manager in general? I would argue that a GUI file manager, terminal and package manager are expected and should be included.

I agree, but on Arch if use preinstalled GUI package manager, it should be pamac, coz Discover have issues with Arch…

Didn’t run into any issues yet. That said if someone decides to install KDE they should have the best KDE experience. There are also hooks in KDE that nicely integrates with Discover (e.g. krunner). Throwing in a gtk app on a KDE installation, when the KDE team worked hard on Discover, isn’t imho a great choice.