Just in case I forget, here’s how to easily install the KDE Desktop on Fedora 40. First we download the components, then we switch over to it and make it the default. I should have taken notes last time but forgot – glad I’m getting another chance to do it again.
Installing KDE
Open up a Terminal window, become the superuser and use this:
dnf groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces"That’s it! All necessary components will be downloaded (just under 600MB). If you want to see what other group configurations are available, type in “dnf grouplist”.
Switching to KDE
You can now sign out and notice there’s a gear icon on the sign in page (bottom right). Click it and pick one of 4 GNOME flavours (nobody really understands why), and one called Plasma. Pick the latter and you’ll use KDE. This is nice if you want to switch desktop environments on a per-session bases.
That’s not most of us though. Thankfully there’s also an option to make KDE the default desktop, so when the system starts, it’ll boot straight into it.
We can do this with a tool called switchdesk. It has a GUI and command line version. Why not install both?
dnf install switchdesk switchdesk-guiThe documentation suggests to “simply run it”, but neglects to tell you where to find it. We can use the GNOME search option and look for “Desktop Switcher”. Launch it and switch to “system default”, which apparently is KDE (these guys aren’t great at labelling or documenting things).
KDE is now the default, but you can switch back to GNOME anytime with the same method.
I would post a link to the official Fedora documentation, but sadly copy/paste has stopped working on my system so… I’ll just log off and find a different hobby. Because operating systems truly suck. All of them. Fact!