KDE required components for a minimal setup

Hey not sure if this is allowed to ask and it may be a rather complicated to answer. What I want is to install KDE with as little as possible installed but without it “breaking”. I want a clean minimal setup. I tried to my luck online but I cant find a definitive answer. Maybe there isnt.

Anyone?

Without resorting to Gentoo and only accounting for the big five distros, minimalism like this is only possible with openSUSE and Debian because they are very diligent at splitting packages and completely allow you to break their requires, suggests, recommends, etc.

Fedora and Arch follow the “simple” philosophy where package contents that they feel should be together are installed together and shouldn’t be split. Fedora less so than Arch. And yes, I’m saying that Arch is not what you’d go for for true minimalism. Of course, if you don’t really want something that minimal, those work too.

I’ve gone this path before and it’s definitely an experiment sort of thing, not a thing you stay on. The result will always be that you end up needing to put more effort than you’d like or can afford (unless you’re really hardware constrained and this is actually a necessity). The end result is also something that KDE explicitly won’t support for reporting bugs, by the way.

You’ll want to spend the time checking most/every binary and package on your system (easiest with shell completion), read how dependencies between services are set up in your distro, investigating services with systemd-analyze and co to see if you should disable them, looking at the upstream KDE projects on Invent to see what they actually are, getting to know your package manager, checking how to properly upgrade your system while not adding more packages every update, etc.

Probably the starting point is to not use your distro’s plasma metapackage and to check what the difference is between all the plasma* packages. If you don’t actually something that minimal, you can of course just attempt to install individual packages and simply not do it when the thing seems like it will uninstall something essential.

Thanx for your answer. I installed kde on debian trixie and most apps were ok but there was some that I didnt think were necessary so I uninstalled them. Maybe I have to do this again.

What does “minimal” mean to you? No audio stack? No Bluetooth? No multi-monitor support? No support for portal-using Flatpak apps? No preview thumbnails for files? No notifications for low disk space or running out of inodes? No GUI for setting up Samba shares? No support for scanning QR codes to connect to Wi-Fi networks? And so on.

It’s possible to omit a lot of stuff, but then of course you’ll lose the functionality that it provides. It all depends on what you’re looking for.

In general I find that most people looking for “a minimal setup” are actually looking for a sane and sensible working setup, and just want to avoid having around a lot of apps they don’t need. The easiest way to achieve this is to start with any sensible distro and remove any pre-installed apps you don’t want.

What I mean by minimal is that at least network works and that apps that exist works. All other stuff I can download myself. I hope so of course :sweat_smile:

And what is a sensible distro?

Plasma’s networking GUI is provided by plasma-nm.

Are you sure this is what you want, though? Like, if you just get plasma-workspace and plasma-desktop and plasma-nm, maybe you still want power management. That’s provided by powerdevil. Did you know that? If not, you’d have been for an adventure figuring it out.

Maybe you also want to be able to change the screen resolution? That comes from kscreen. Did you know that?

And so on. Hopefully you see where I’m going with this, because it’ll be the same for every other system component that comes in an optional package you decide you want to install yourself only if needed.

Now, is Plasma without power management or the ability to change the screen resolution using a GUI “broken”? It’ll depend on how you define the term.

So if your idea of a good time is building an OS from low-level pieces like this, have at it! Arch is probably the best choice for this. It can be really fun, and you’ll learn a lot too.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to just have a system that works, I’d recommend forgetting about being “minimal.” Instead just download Fedora KDE and use Discover to uninstall any pre-installed apps you don’t want to use. Boom, job’s done. :slight_smile:

I found a github with someone who made a minimal guide. He had a long list of things to install. I looked them up on the kde package site and some of them I understood and some looked like they were not important from their description.

I installed fedora and downloaded what the guide said and it seem to work. I haven’t installed all things I want yet so there can be some problems down the road. I will see.

I understand what your getting at. Sometimes it’s not worth the hassle but it feels good when you get it to work.