I’ve just spun up a Vm of AlmaLinux 9 through Cockpit, but to my surprise it didn’t come with a desktop environment installed. It was an auto-download so probably didn’t contain any such components (it would come with GNOME by default). I had to do a little digging and found out how to install KDE, then switch to the graphical login by default.
Installing EPEL
dnf didn’t show anything related to the KDE Desktop, but we can get it via the EPEL Repo (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). Let’s download and enable it.
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
dnf updateLet’s enable the code ready builds as well (those are more extra packages).
dnf config-manager --set-enabled crbInstalling KDE Plasma
dnf group list will show collections of stuff we can install, one of which is KDE.
dnf group install "KDE Plasma Workspaces"
rebootA reboot should now show us the login screen for KDE. If that’s not the case, your installation may be set to boot to the command line, like mine was. Here’s how to switch it:
systemctl set-default graphical.target