Getting the Right Look-- Installing KDE Plasma over Cinnamon in Mint 15

[Dngrsone]

After much convincing by our friend Moody Blues, I finally decided to give KDE/Plasma one more good try as a Desktop environment.

While I like *buntu in general, liked Unity, I didn't like the direction that Canonical was headed, so I went to Mint, which is a fork of Ubuntu.

I like Cinnamon desktop, clean, but not nearly as customizable as things go, so Moody convinced me to try KDE one more time.

I had tried KDE several times before-- back in the '90s when Linux was still an obscure, almost niche product, and every once in a while when I shopped for new OSs to try, but I never liked the look, nor the interface, and the DE is not really intuitive like some of the other ones are.

But, I missed the customization that I had with the Gnome 2 desktop interface, and Gnome 3 (which is what Cinnamon runs over) isn't quite there, yet.

So here I am-- installing KDEs Plasma desktop environment alongside Cinnamon in the Mint 15 instance on my laptop.

This is a record of the problems I have encountered and maybe solved along the way.

 

[Dngrsone]

Initially, I tried installing only the Plasma desktop.

sudo apt-get kde-plasma-desktop

This didn't work out so well, so I installed the full KDE experience.

sudo apt-get install kde-full

... or so I thought.

Part of the KDE-full installation included another instance of Fireefox, which really borked up my custom setup with five different profiles.

This reset the theme on my default profile and changed the fonts in Firefox. Among other things.

 

[Dngrsone]

Okay, after a bit of searching around, and I found this which helped me in a roundabout way to fix things, at least in the Cinnamon side.

The path for my fonts.conf was actually /home/dngrsone/.config/fontconfig

 

[Dngrsone]

Regardless of what themes I loaded to get a decent look in KDE, a lot of the programs I use that came with Cinnamon continued to carry that gray, NT-feeling squarish look.

I fixed this by using Synaptic to install kde-config-gtk-style and kde-config-gtk-style-preview.

This allowed me to install a little more reasonable style for Banshee, et al.

There is also an oxygen integration package I found, here, but I haven't tried it yet.

 

[Dngrsone]

Apparently, kdesudo didn't install; once I got that, it looks like the update manager will work as advertised.

sudo apt-get install kdesudo

 

[Dngrsone]

This is a problem between KDE and my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5238.

I have UEFI set up to use the Function keys as F1-F12, and the special keys (brightness, sound volume, mute &etc) enabled through a combination of Fn+Function key.

This was broken when running under Plasma.

I fixed the sound problem by adding a sound management widget (I don't know which one, it doesn't show in my list anymore) to my task manager panel.

I had to install smartdimmer to dim and brighten my display at whim.

The increments are very fine, and there is no indicators showing that anything is happening, but it is there.

 

[TheAtheistReverend]

I have been using Mint with cinnamon on my laptop for some time now. Been curious about kde and as a noob I'm wondering if it's possible to try it w/o screwing up my current setup?

BTW, got any screenies for us?

 

[Dngrsone]

Given the chance to start over, I'd probably go ahead and install Mint (KDE) alongside, instead of adding it on top of Cinnamon.

I am at work at the moment, so no screenshots at the moment.

 

[Davdi]

Running multiple DEs is much easier with PCLinuxOS. I currently have KDE and XFCE happily co-existing in the one install, and can choose between them at logon. They also have MATE but not cinnamon. look her if you're interested: So cool ice cubes are jealous

 

[MoodyBlues]

I have tons of DEs installed, just because I can. Here are my choices on my HP laptop:

 

[argedion]

I'm running OpenSuse with KDE and it does just fine. I like the look and feel of it and its comfortable to use

 

[mikedt]

I got a choice as well, because I can.

 

[Davdi]

After trying Gnome 2 & 3 (2 is better), KDE, Enlightenment, LXDE and XFCE, my DEs of choice are XFCE4 and LXDE. lightweight but still decently customizable.

 

[saptech]

I've always been a Gnome 2 user but on my current machine, I have Gnome 3, KDE4, Openbox & Fluxbox installed. I really wasn't a KDE user but since I've installed it, I've been using it more & more and enjoying it alot more then in the past. I'm sticking with Gnome 3 to try and like it and hopefully, it will mature and become better.

On another partition (dual boot), I have Xfce4 & Openbox installed and that OS flies. It is SalixOS, based on Slackware 14.

I like LXDE better then Xfce, but it needs to mature some more for my taste.

 

[MoodyBlues]

I really wasn't a KDE user but since I've installed it, I've been using it more & more and enjoying it alot more then in the past.

Yay!

You know, when KDE made its huge leap [when it went from the 3 series to 4], I thought it was awful. In fact, I went back to GNOME--briefly--afterward in protest. A lot of things just didn't work right, widgets crashed, it was hard to get the look I wanted, etc., so off to GNOME I went. Briefly. Now, looking back, it's hard to remember KDE being that bad or my being that unhappy with it. They've come a very long way and no matter how many other DEs I toy with, I always come home to K.