How I Customized my KDE Plasma Desktop

hello everybody this is techa and in this video what i'm going to be doing is showing you my kde plasma desktop environment how i have everything set up the theming the applications just about everything now i've been using this for about five months or so so i kind of got everything together how it's going to stay for a while so i have the neo fetch right here so i can kind of give you a rundown of what's going on this is manjaro linux with the 5.8 kernel running a plasma 5.19 i'm currently using the kwin window manager with the chrome os dark theme and a couple more things that we're going to get into in a minute so i will be zooming in on the screen in a second but while we're in this ultra wide view i'm going to kind of show you some of the things that we won't be able to see later so the very first thing down here is the start menu i've selected you can see it's right here if i go ahead and right click and i go to show alternatives you can see i'm currently using simple menu and these are some of the other ones that i've tried out and i've had it installed throughout any point in this video if you think that there's something i should try out or take a look at go ahead and comment it down below i'm using simple menu here it's really really nice if i hit cancel you can see you have your tree of categories you have all applications and then you can kind of shuffle through that additionally up here i don't really click this that often but if i tap on here i have the u launcher menu which is really really nice it's kind of a more full screen visual thing what i actually use is i go window key a and that brings up the the u launcher so i do that a lot window key a if i'm in my desktop and i want to kind of bring up that full display additionally up here in the top right hand corner i have my color picker i used to have it down here on my taskbar but it did take up quite a bit of room so this is a really nice tool i use it a lot for creating thumbnails and getting exact color codes so you just click here and you have your little pointer so you go ahead and give something a click and then get the exact color code for whatever it is that you selected that's a really handy utility for some of the things i do so now i zoomed in a little bit so we can kind of get a better grasp of what's going on down here we're going to take a look at this actual panel is what they call it i call it my taskbar but if we go over here and hit edit panel the first thing i did is most people have it widescreen all the way you can use these little drag tools to kind of move and resize it you can see here i can resize it to whatever size i want i can use this one to resize it but it seems to be right here in the middle is kind of how i like it it's kind of like a macintosh dock with a lot more functionality you change the that's the screen edge i was just adjusting you could just the height adding spacers what i do is i add two spacers right here in between my system monitoring tools so right here i have the individual core usage and the memory usage and then over here kind of by my system tray i have the actual thermal temperature i used to have gpu but that wasn't really necessary so i just put cpu over here and it also was over here but it just didn't look as good so getting out of this we can close it out up here and let's go over some of the changes i've made if you've watched my top 10 kde widgets you're going to see a lot of those go as i go over this now right here is the event calendar i use this primarily to do a little quick glimpse at a calendar and to check the weather has a lot of detail on the weather this is really really nice under my system tray i have it slightly configured so it doesn't show some things but i haven't really done much there right here is my individual core usage you saw that in another video and this is the memory usage before we get into the theming what i'm going to do real quick is run through some of my most commonly used applications and a lot of them are down here on this task manager and this is the icons only task manager so the first thing of course is my files this right here is the actual gnome file manager i usually use dolphin but i've been trying this out because dolphin kind of has a lot of features that i don't really use so i'm looking for something cleaner so i'm kind of experimenting with this but if i were to go close that out and go window key f it brings up dolphin so i do do this if i'm going into doing uh like video projects and i'm going to be jumping back and forth between certain directories a lot specifically this split feature i find super handy so you could have two different folders open at the same time and be able to drag and drop things really easy so i use dolphin more than the gnome file manager i've just been recently using this for more kind of just a more lightweight more visually appealing format without all these extra features everywhere but if i'm actually doing like heavy workflow and video editing i'll go ahead and pop dolph and open and put up the split screen and have that running in the background next you'll see down here i have two web browsers chrome and vivaldi i've kind of been trying to go over to this one a little bit more over chrome just because it's a lot nicer has more features but it's still running based on chrome but i i still use chrome a lot more than this go over here we have our add remove software i use this quite frequently especially using this to access the aur and this is kind of giving you a preview of the theming this is absolutely beautiful the color and all that the chrome os theme is awesome um going on that we have caden live i use kaden live a lot it's a wonderful video editor i've talked about a ton in the past it's basically a open source version of adobe premiere pro and i love it and then we have obs studio i'm using that right now you can see on the screen it's really nice i'm kind of learning more and more how to use it once i master it i'll come out with a separate tutorial so you can see this is the screen i was just on then i could go to middle screen or i could even go to the webcam only so you can see me talking like this but let's go back to the middle screen get rid of that and next we have this is actually glimpse image editor it's basically with a couple minor changes that's kind of a hit or miss i i don't i'm not really familiar enough even with to give a comparison on that but i've just been using that because it's been suggested and it's what i have next is virtualbox i use virtualbox on the daily i just moved some files around so these are going to be inaccessible but virtualbox is wonderful for testing out distributions then we have the terminal that's self-explanatory that's a daily use thing and i went over everything else so now i'm going to go ahead and open up my start menu and type in system settings just like i kind of run down the actual theming that i'm using so into the actual plasma settings if i go under global theme you can see kind of everything i tried out like i said if there's something you don't see here that is wonderful go ahead and let me know down below so far the chrome os dark theme has been rather surprising i used the sweet mars and suite for quite a while those are both beautiful but this one is more it's more clean those are kind of it's borderline cartoonish with how they have the colors and some of that and that's just not my style so chrome os is kind of what i've been going for if i go down to the plasma style i just stick with the default the chrome os under application style this is kind of where i want custom if i go under the configure gnome gtk application style click on that i went with this kiss dark i think is how you say it i hope and then for the actual application style by default i have it selected as the breeze oxygen is really good too under window decorations i have it as the chrome os dark just because sticking with that chrome os another one that's really really good is the the sweet mars i know i just said i don't like it but the uh if you're gonna go with anything there uh window decorations is really really nice let's go under colors i have the where what do i have selected here have anything selected i think i have chrome os yeah there it is chrome os dark that's what's selected fonts i did change my fonts around a little bit i really like the urw gothic font if you can't tell i've been using that a lot in my thumbnails i just think it looks good it's super clean but i did just change this to that so it's not like i've been using this on a consistent basis for the icons i'm currently rocking the tila dark icons here and i was using the windows 10 ones for a while the candy icons are kind of the color colorful vibrant ones so if you're into that but i really like this it makes everything look really really nice i like the folder icons all the application icons cursors i changed it to the white sir dark so the one that comes with the white sur theme i really like that i tried to get the system kind of to look like a macintosh for a little bit but i couldn't get some of the things to work so i'm going to make sure everything works perfectly fine before i explore more into that under the workspace i kind of i changed some things in here i'm not exactly sure where the setting was but i made it so that the there it is window placement when you open a window uh it's centered by default a lot of the times it will open up far in the top corner so i changed that to be centered because that's kind of how windows generally handles it and that's just what i'm used to but that's really about it when it comes to my overall theming and how i have it set up and the applications i have on my taskbar for quick access please let me know down below if you're running kde plasma specifically what themes you're running and maybe if you're using a theme what things you're pulling from other themes and visual designs to use so that about wraps that up i hope you have a wonderful day hit that like button subscribe for more content like this and goodbye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 28,178

Rating: 4.9044943 out of 5

Keywords: manjaro, kde, kde plasma, desktop, linux, customize manjaro, mac os linuc, mac os linux, chrome os linux, kde plasma config

Id: QCe0e1TOKcU

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020