KDE on EPEL
KDE was part of RHEL up through RHEL 7. Starting at with RHEL 8, KDE was removed and there was only some qt packages left in RHEL. The removal of KDE allowed the EPEL community to build the KDE Plasma Desktop in EPEL.
Installation
Install / Enable EPEL
Follow the EPEL Quickstart Instructions.
Install KDE
- dnf install plasma-desktop (less packages)
or
- dnf group install kde-desktop-environment (more packages)
or
- dnf group install kde-desktop (medium amount of packages)
- (Optional) dnf group install kde-apps
- Includes apps such a kmines, krusader and ktorrent
- (Optional) dnf group install kde-media
- Includes apps such as kolourpaint, gwenview and dragon
- (Optional) dnf group install kde-education
- Includes apps such as kturtle, kanagram and kwordquiz
(Optional if Workstation already installed) Set sddm as desktop manager
- systemctl set-default graphical.target
- dnf install sddm\*
- systemctl enable sddm -f
- reboot
(If Workstation already installed, and didn't enable sddm)
- systemctl reload gdm
(Optional) Install apps via flatpak
- dnf -y install flatpak
- flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
You can then install flatpak apps from https://flathub.org e.g.
- flatpak install flathub org.kde.kdenlive
- kdenlive allows you to create and edit videos
- flatpak install flathub org.kde.krita
- krita is a drawing program
Update Schedule
EPEL Users are running on a stable Enterprise Linux, and expect stability. KDE is a fairly fast updating desktop. If it isn't updated fairly regularly, it is hard to keep up with bugs and security issues. The EPEL updates of KDE Plasma Desktop try to keep things as stable as possible, while still keeping things updated.
Update Timing EPEL 8
EPEL 8 KDE Plasma Desktop is going to stay at the releases that they currently are at. We will backport major security fixes. Bugs and bugfixes will be best effort. But we will not do any across the board updates.
This is due to the older libraries in RHEL 8. We've hit the limit that the newer KDE versions can run on the older libraries.
Update Timing EPEL 9
EPEL 9 KDE Plasma Desktop is going to stay at the releases that they currently are at. We will backport major security fixes. Bugs and bugfixes will be best effort. But we will not do any across the board updates.
This is due to the older libraries in RHEL 9. We've hit the limit that the newer KDE versions can run on the older libraries.
Exception: QT6 - At the time of this writing, it is still possible to update QT6 in EPEL9. We do not expect that to last for the lifetime of EPEL 9
Update Timing EPEL 10
The KDE Plasma Desktop version for EPEL 10 (for CentOS Stream) will be synced over and built from the latest stable Fedora release every couple of months. This keeps things more stable than Fedora, but still keeps up with the latest versions and updates.
Update Timing EPEL 10.N
The KDE Plasma Desktop version for EPEL 10.N (example 10.0) will be whatever version it was when it was branched from epel10. There might be bugfixes and/or security fixes for individual packages. If necessary, there might be minor vesion updates (6.3.2 => 6.3.4) but not major version updates (6.3.2 => 6.4.2) unless there is a critical bug and/or security fix.
Qt updates in RHEL
RHEL updates it's minor version of QT around once a year. (Example: qt6.8 => qt6.9) This often requires QT based packages to be rebuilt or updated. We will rebuild or update the appropriate KDE packages in EPEL when this happens.
