KDE-at-Arch

Random notes on how to tune KDE on Arch Linux.

Appearance

Font

HiDPI

Set your favorite scaling factor in System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Displays -> Scale Display. Before you continue, please ensure you've install the correct driver (xf86-video-intel for example), DO NOT use mesa!

For SDDM, the following config makes it work well (from Arch Wiki).

# /etc/sddm.conf.d/dpi.conf
[X11]
ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi 166  # calculate your screen's real DPI on http://www.pxcalc.com and paste it here

Konsole and Yaquake may show transperent horizontal lines randomly, it's known as a bug and already fixed (update your video driver). But for reference, there's a dirty trick I used before.

Cursor

Fix terrible old-style cursor shown on titlebar:

# /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme
[Icon Theme]
#Inherits=Adwaita
Inherits=breeze_cursors

Top Panel

Latte Dock + 3x Active Window Control (1 for application title, 1 for double click to maximize/restore control, 1 for buttons control).

Title Bar

To get a more integrated title bar, follow this instruction. To remove the blue horizontal line between title bar and windows, head to System Settings -> Application Style -> Window Decorations -> Theme -> Configure Breeze and uncheck a self-explained option.

Window Decoration

If an application ask KWin not to draw decoration for it, aka Client Side Decoration, KWin will not draw ANY decoration, including shadow around it. So it will look extremely ugly if the application doesn't do its job well, in this case we can create a window rule to forcefully draw decoration for it, see ForceBorderNCM.kwinrule for example.

But there's a known bug: close button on system title bar cannot close NCM correctly, so we need to kill it manually, which is just annoying.

PS: for GNOME apps, there is a package gtk3-no-csd-git on AUR to help disable CSD automatically (haven't confirmed).

Control

Shortcut

If you want to activate applications launcher simply by pressing Win, just as what you do on Windows,

When using Latte-Dock, have a look at here.
When using plasma dock, set it's shortcut to Alt+F1.

Global Menu

Global menu works seamlessly on Qt apps. For others like VSCode, Chrome and LibreOffice, install these packages then re-login, though I don't know which one actually do the job:

sudo pacman -S appmenu-gtk-module libdbusmenu-{glib,gtk{2,3}}

File Manager

In order to instruct Dolphin to mount disk partitions without requiring root privilege, fisrt usermod "$USER" -G storage --append then put this configuration into /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/.

TODO

upload configurations, including latte-dock settings, customized color schemes, chrome's plugins
theme, including workspace, titlebar, icon (take a look at this)
kinetic scrolling with libinput
shortcuts configurations upload
fine-tuning of the top panel (how to make title always locate at the center, at the same time don't shadow the global menu?)
fix netease cloud music (close button)

ZeppLu / KDE-at-Arch