Really liking KDE on NixOS, but occasionally I run into QT problems. It has been a few months (years?) without them, so maybe something has substantially improved. Not sure whether these issues are KDE-specific, though.
Plasma 5.24 landed in unstable today and I’m really liking it.
Only part I’m worried is that it took longer than a month for the PR to land in unstable after being merged in staging. Granted it was unrelated reasons, but it feels weird that Gnome issue can hold back plasma update.
A maintainer team shall be a great help. If nothing else, it will probably allow a central communication around the topic in a place less black-hole-y than nixpkgs PR/issue tracker.
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I love KDE as well. Wayland + KDE + different DPI screens still have some glitches on 5.23.x but now with 5.24 being out I’m eager to try it and see if it gets better.
do you know a nice and clean config for Wayland + KDE (intel + nvidia & 4k displays)
[you would need a nixpkgs-wayland overlay?]
No overlay needed. Enable plasma as usual and select Wayland during login.
4K works well, including fractional scaling. Nvidia does not work with h/w acceleration, but software accel works well enough.
I just disabled nvidia and haven’t really missed it outside sporadic gaming and ML work.
However, if your nvidia is new enough you can use it in offload-mode and get the best of both worlds.
Edit: Regarding 4K, for some reason HDMI didn’t work with mt laptop for external 4K display. Same port, same machine, same cable worked on Windows. For NixOS I had to buy a DisplayPort cable and that worked. Surprisingly Windows didn’t work with that…
I’ve been using KDE Plasma on NixOS unstable for 7 months now and I’m loving it so far.
The main issues that I’ve come across:
- The built-in system store is super buggy and glitchy for me and basically has never worked correctly. By system store, I mean the window that opens up when you try to download community-made tools like themes, Kwin scripts, service menus and etc.
- There are duplicate themes in system settings.
- After the update to 5.23.3, the Ark service menus (compress, extract to) in dolphin just disappeared. They came back after updating to 5.23.5.
- The zooming functionality of KWin has stopped working for me from 5.23.3 onwards.
- The caching functionality of system settings broke for me a couple of times and I had to manually erase its cache from the home folder.
- File associations sometimes just didn’t seem to work. For example, I would check the
Remember application association for all files...checkbox when opening a file with a new file extension, but the next time I would try to open that file, it would open up theSelect program...dialogue again. After a little digging, I found that installing some applications withnix profilesometimes messes up the location of its mime types for Plasma. After installing the same application through the system environment, the mime type and application association seemed to work.
- The caching functionality of system settings broke for me a couple of times and I had to manually erase its cache from the home folder.
just want to thank you for your tip on clearing caches for system settings, it broke the editing of network connections for me on 5.24, had a horrible time troubleshooting, rolling back my configuration only led to more issues like sddm crashing on startup, presumably due to other cache problems as well
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I am using KDE with wayland on Nixos 21.11 and it works (mostly) fine for me.
When I activate two monitor my panel vanishes. Never had the time to dig into this problem.
@ngiger Panel issue was fixed in plasma 5.24.x. Now they have a proper “primary display” notion like back in the Xorg days. You can upgrade to 22.05 to get plasma 5.24.
Plasma works well on X11, but on Wayland, I wish that this issue could be fixed: GTK_THEME is not set by plasma wayland · Issue #155292 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.
That’s the font rendering, but GTK_THEME doesn’t have anything to do with gtkUsePortal.
actually GTK_THEME was fixed by that suggestion too.
In fact all of my bug reports for gtk on kde wayland were related to that.
Krunner just doesn’t work for me. For some reason, it’s not enabled by default with rest of the plasma DE, and even if added to the system manually, it refuses to respond to it’s hotkey. 
KDE definitely needs some love and attention on NixOS. all the basic functionality is in place, but there’s a lot of rough edges ready to cut you when you use it daily.
Try checking the global hotkey for krunner. I think upstream changed it a few releases ago…
I use krunner as my primary launcher and it’s fine here. Not using the original shortcut though but that’s been the case for years.
true, running fine on Plasma 5.24 with NixOS 22.05. Krunner could just react slightly faster if you ask me 
checked the hotkey, and it’s set to alt+F2 like it’s always been. alt+shift+F2 to search using the clipboard.
with krunner running in the background, it doesn’t react to the hotkey. adding a new binding to launch a fresh krunner instance when the hotkey is pressed works, but with ~700ms delay 
Maybe i need to try it on a fresh profile…
Just in case… I have a delay the first time I pop up krunner, but it’s quick after that. Been using KDE with NixOS for years, and relied on krunner for most of that.
It’s launched on demand. You can override the systemd unit to have it launch AOT.
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