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KDE Plasma

Updated Jul 13, 20263 min read Suggest an edit

Installing All Packages

pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm noto-fonts noto-fonts-emoji

systemctl enable sddm

reboot

Dropped xorg from this line vs. the old version — on Plasma 6 the Wayland session is default and pulls in Xwayland (xorg-xwayland) automatically for legacy X11 apps. Installing the full xorg group is no longer needed (see the X11 note below). Added noto-fonts/noto-fonts-emoji because a fresh Arch install ships almost no fonts and menus/emoji will render as boxes otherwise.

Roughly 5.5–7GiB installed depending on what’s already present (the kde-applications-meta suite is the bulk of it).

You should be fine installing the packages above and that’s it but see below for more information about those packages above and some other ones that are optional.

Installing Separately

X11 Compatibility (Wayland is the default now)

Plasma 6 defaults to Wayland, and the old “install xorg as a failover display server” step is outdated.

  • For X11-only applications running inside your Wayland session, you need Xwayland (xorg-xwayland) — but it’s already pulled in as a dependency of the Plasma Wayland session, so there’s nothing to do.
  • For an actual X11 login session as a fallback, install plasma-x11-session (it also pulls kwin-x11). Since Plasma 6.4, X11 no longer installs by default; since Plasma 6.7 → 6.8 the Xorg session is being removed entirely. On this machine’s Intel UHD 630, Wayland runs cleanly (no Nvidia GBM/driver drama), so treat the X11 session as genuinely optional rather than a required backup.
# Only if you specifically want an X11 fallback login session:
pacman -S plasma-x11-session

KDE Plasma

pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta

The Applications package installs default KDE applications like Konsole, Dolphin, and Ark, along with a whole suite of other applications.

This isn’t necessary but it’s easier to swap out, say, an image viewer (KDE Applications installs Gwenview by default) than it is to have to remember that you actually needed it and have to manually install it later when you need to do something quick. But again, it’s not absolutely required, just highly recommended.

plasma-meta is the meta-package (all its members treated as one unit). If you’d rather be able to uninstall individual pieces later, install the plasma group instead — same packages, but each is explicitly installed and individually removable.

Display Manager

pacman -S sddm

systemctl enable sddm

SDDM is the currently supported Display Manager for KDE Plasma; this gives us a user-friendly login screen to start our Wayland/X11 session rather than having to start it from the terminal.

Machine-Specific Essentials — OptiPlex 5060 / Intel UHD 630

Graphics (Intel)

pacman -S mesa intel-media-driver vulkan-intel

This is the Wayland-first replacement for the “Install Nvidia Drivers” step in the base guide — there’s no dGPU here. mesa provides the OpenGL/driver stack, intel-media-driver enables VA-API hardware video decode (Gen8+ / UHD 630 is supported), and vulkan-intel covers Vulkan. Intel needs no Xorg config file or kernel-parameter fiddling; KMS + mesa “just works” on Wayland out of the box.

Audio (PipeWire)

pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber pipewire-alsa

Modern Arch/Plasma uses PipeWire (PulseAudio’s successor). pipewire-pulse is the drop-in PulseAudio replacement daemon and wireplumber is the session manager that actually routes audio. If you boot in and have no sound, this trio is almost always why. Log out/in (or reboot) after installing so the user services start.