kde plasma desktop environment issue

[LOYINuts]

Why doesn't installing the KDE Plasma desktop include basic apps like Konsole and Dolphin?

[ak1ra26]

I thought I was stupid and broke something, but really, the file manager and Konsole are not installed!

[novadragonDOTspace]

#4336 has a whole discussion there about "minimal desktop" which i would say should contain the the file browser and the terminal, but the plasma-meta package just doesnt and the inherent denial of archinstall right now to include anything outside plasma-meta or plasma-desktop in their kde plasma profiles.

[h8d13]

You now get to pick between minimal and full. Perhaps needs a version bump to hit repos, unsure

[novadragonDOTspace]

it's not full cause neither the plasma group, plasma-meta as the meta package or plasma-desktop include Konsole or Dolphin. For a "full" installation, either the kde-applications-meta meta package or kde-applications group would be needed additionally.

[h8d13]

You are correct: I had actually pointed this out #4389 (comment)

(but was ignored)

[svartkanin]

As pointed out in the linked discussion there is no pleasing every single user. This is what archinstall went with for now and this should give enough freedom to pick what suits best, or at least closest to what would be an ideal for a given user.

[LOYINuts]

This is insane

[h8d13]

It would not cost too much to add dolphin and konsole which most users expect.

Or this upstream the issue. I'm unsure where this lands tbh maybe @antonio-rojas can tell us best course of action for archinstall.

[antonio-rojas]

Or this upstream the issue. I'm unsure where this lands tbh maybe @antonio-rojas can tell us best course of action for archinstall.

Upstream KDE has a very clear separation between Plasma (the desktop) and Applications (which are desktop agnostic). Plasma, by definition, doesn't include any applications.

On the archinstall level, since you now seem to provide different options, you could add a "Plasma + selected apps" one. There is no Arch meta package providing "KDE recommended apps" though (there is no official recommendation from upstream and every possible choice would be opinionated), so the app selection would have to be done by archinstall (installing any kde-applications-meta subpackage would not be appropriate IMO, those are meant to provide every app in a certain category). But then of course you'd have to deal with all subsequent "add X because I use it" or "remove X because bloat" requests (which is the main reason why I'm not providing such a meta package on Arch)