This is probably a FAQ, but I don’t yet speak KDE terminology, so my searches aren’t finding anything. (I installed Kubuntu 25.10 2 days ago, and my head is still spinning.)
KDE has something that looks and mostly behaves like a MacOS task bar, and may be correctly called a “panel”.
It’s my preference to pin the apps I use the most to the task bar/panel to launch them conveniently. I’d rather not use the Application Launcher, icons on my desk top, or the KDE equivalent to MacOS’ Spotlight - launched with control+space (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what KDE calls it.)
One of these apps is violently allergic to Wayland, but can be made to behave by launching it with the environment variable GDK_BACKEND=x11. I’d like to make this happen via a pinned task bar icon - not e.g. by running a shell script wrapper from the command line.
Everything I’ve seen says KDE can be configured to do just about anything I can imagine, but I’m failing to find the right documentation to tell me how to do this.
Can it be done? And if so, how?
Feel free to just give me a link to documentation, or even correct my terminology so a search will work.
The panel is the whole bar. The task Manager is one widget on it. As are the system tray and various Application Launchers. It IS pretty darned confusing at times, for sure.
But you can add, remove, and rearrange these widgets on the panel.
You can have panels positioned on any edge, have multiple panels with different settings and sizes.
To get an application to launch using your desired settings, you just need to edit its menu item, using the Menu Editor. Either use krunner (alt-space or alt-f2, or just start typing ‘menu’ on the desktop).
Find the application in there, add the desired option in the 'Environmental Variables; section, and save.
Now the pinned icon might not follow this setting immediately, or you may need to remove the existing pin and re-add it after launching it and verifying the variable is in use. I am not sure on this one.
This is a good starting point
It WILL be outdated but much of it is still valid. The main concepts should still be the same.
Volunteers don’t seem to like creating or updating docs. I resemble this statement myself.
You don’t need a wrapper script for this. For example, I simply change the command /usr/bin/audacity to GDK_BACKEND=x11 /usr/bin/audacity in order to get Audacity menu displayed by the Global Menu widget in my top panel. This can be done via Menu Editor, or manually by copying the application .desktop file from /usr/share/applications to /$HOME/.local/share/applications, editing the file, and pinning it to the panel.
I prefer this method because I also add “Actions” which effectively result in a very handy context menu, including other apps in the same category, or even shell scripts.
default panel: includes the widgets for task manager, app launcher/menu, pager, system tray, and clock, all of which can be removed swapped around and customized.
app launcher/menu: widget for organizing your installed applications which includes and editor function where you can add things like environment variables and command line switches.
.desktop files: the app launcher/menu uses a file format with the .desktop extension and as you make edits using the editor your installed application .desktop files will be copied from the main /usr/share/applications/ folder to your personal ~/.local/share/applications/
you can drag these .desktop files to the task manager, a panel or simply to the desktop for accessing however you prefer.
The Menu Editor was unaware of the existence of the app, which I’d installed by copying to my $HOME - it didn’t arrive packaged as a .deb or similar. But I noticed a “new” option in the Menu editor, and filled in appropriate fields.
Thank you.
You also wrote:
Volunteers don’t seem to like creating or updating docs. I resemble this statement myself.
I see what I’ll be doing, if I decide I have time and energy to help with KDE.
It seems the task bar loses the app’s icon and name when the app exits - it gets replaced by something that might be intended to represent a blank piece of paper, with a tooltip of java. I noticed this when I tried out the icons-and-text version of the task manager, which seems to segregate apps that are pinned but not running. (It also represents them as icons-with-tooltips, not text and icon.)
With other pinned apps in this state, I can launch them by left clicking them, but this vestigial “java” thing is unresponsive.
However, when I launch the problem app via alt-space, the piece-of-paper icon is replaced by the app’s actual icon and name.
Oddly, I also found a desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ for another app I’d tried the same process with. That app so far can’t be convinced to work reliably, probably due to an unrelated problem, so I’d deleted it from the Menu Editor after giving up for now on fixing it. The Menu Editor agrees with me that no such app exists. BUT it left the file.
Interestingly enough, alt-space is willing to offer me the second app, even though the menu editor thinks it’s gone. (It doesn’t actually launch, but so far I’ve entirely failed to get it to launch from anything but the command line, whereupon it launches with everything too small to be convenient.)
