Making KDE Plasma look and feel perfect

It's safe to say that one of KDE's superpowers is customization. Thanks to Plasma, most aspects of the shell are provided by some kind of widget, fully open and customizable. This means you can spend a great many hours lost in tweaking things until they work, look and feel juuuuust right.

Add to that, building new widgets is not only effortless by using simple QML and JavaScript, but the source code for all default widgets is already available on your system for you to explore and learn from. So indeed, widget all the things!

With all this power to change everything, it's not easy to focus on essentials. So for the purpose of this post, I will mention 3 "essential" tweaks I apply on a fresh KDE installation.

• Change the wallpaper
• Simplify the bottom panel, add a top panel
• Adapt global shortcuts

The post refers to Plasma version 6.2, but it's probably applicable to the entire 6.x series.

KDE Distributions come preloaded with gorgeous wallpapers created freely by people like you and me. You can right-click on the desktop, select "Desktop and Wallpaper" and choose the one that works best for you.

What I specifically want to point out, is the "Get New" button available in the upper-right corner. It allows you to browse and discover the thousands of available assets provided by the community in the KDE Store (which is also available on the web).

The wallpaper in the screenshots is one of the default ones included in KDE called Darkest Hour by Risto Saukonpää

All KDE panels are widgets themselves and they contain widgets. The clock is a widget, the task switcher is a widget, the tray icons (like the Wi-Fi, volume, brightness etc) are also part of a widget called System Tray.

In this step, right-click on the bottom panel and choose "Show Panel Configuration". This activates edit mode of sorts, where we can adapt the layout of the panel and quickly add and remove widgets from it.

• Set alignment to Center
• Set width to Fit Content
• Hover over parts of the bottom panel and remove all widgets except two: "Icons-Only Task Manager" and "Peek at Desktop"

While still in edit mode, click on the "Add Panel" button and select "Application Menu Bar". This will add a second top bar to the desktop.

While still in edit mode, click on "Add or Manage Widgets" to have the widget selector appear on the left. You can now drag and drop new widgets wherever you like them to be (you're not restricted by panels, widgets are responsive and can also exist on the desktop).

For the top bar, I like to choose 3 widgets:

• Add "Application Menu" which offers a list of apps installed on the system. I also like to change the icon.
• Add a "Panel Spacer" to the right of the "Global Menu"/"Application Menu" (so the global menu button is pushed all the way to the left)
• Add a "System Tray" widget on the right side (the spacer will push it all the way to the right of the screen)

Tip: You can adapt many aspects of each widget. For example, the icon for the global menu, format and size of the date and clock and many, many more.

As I often switch between KDE and macOS, there are a few essential shortcuts I like to bring with me from the Mac. Taking screenshots! KDE comes with an app called Spectacle which is a mighty powerful tool to capture screenshots and record the screen. So I bring in the shortcuts for taking a screenshot on the Mac as follows:

• Go to "Shortcuts" in System Settings. You can click your way there, or use KRunner by hitting Alt+Space and typing "Shortcuts".
• Select "Spectacle" from the list of applications.
• Update the shortcuts you'd like to change.

Enjoy your KDE setup and remember everything you see, has been created by passionate people who care deeply about free and open software. KDE could always use your support.