Hey All,
I’m a long-time Gnome user and I’ve decided to give KDE Plasma 6/Wayland a try. My system is running f40 Fedora Workstation with the KDE Plasma 6.0.5 installed as an alternate DE.
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It seems to me that the DE starts as a non-login shell. I’m running Bash as my shell, and once I get to the stage of opening a kitty terminal, it seems that my ~/.bash_login is not getting run as the export’d environment variables from there aren’t set in the shell. Are non-login shells running below the Plasma session not consider child processes?
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Unfortunately, I’ve already managed to munge my Taskbar widget to smithereens. Is there a way to return to the original default? I’m very happy to completely restart whatever configurations I may have changed between my initial session and now, and be taken all the way back to ground zero for everything overall. Is that possible? If so, how?
If these things are described in an FAQ laying around somewhere, please feel free to heckle. I’m more than happy to RTFM if I can find the right place to do it.
Many thanks!
cheers,
john
you can just add a panel and chose the default panel which should include the task manager et.al.
my .profile is where i add variables like $PATH that i want for my plasma session.
Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions!
Unfortuately, when I symbolic linked ~/.profile to my ~/.bash_profile and re-booted, this did not work.
All of the environment variables that I define in it are exported, so they should propagate to all subprocesses. It’s pretty clear that they are not.
As I mentioned, I am trying all of this out as a straight-up Fedora Workstation user, which is by definition a Gnome DE shop. I did nothing to change my usual way of starting other than install the KDE Desktop dnf group and choose KDE Plasma at the next restart.
I took a quick breeze through my system log, and saw that there are some gdm and gnome-shell processes that get started via systemd at startup time. Maybe these are setting up some conflicts that propagate as errors to my short circuit my startup? No matter what, it’s clear that I’m going to have to up my commitment if I want to give this whole KDE thing more than a test drive.
Thanks again!
i’m on kubuntu and don’t have to link anything … i think .profile gets run before i even open a console window.
My system displays the login greeter via gdm-session-worker.
I think your experience is how it should be! It should grok the .profile or .bash_profile at the top level, which should be either the gdm-wayland-session, startplasma-wayland or kwin_wayland processes that start one after the other after accepting my login info.
Everything that starts rooted from there should be getting all of the exported environment variables. Certainly that is how it’s working with the Gnome DE with bash as my user shell.
I’ve done just a bit of looking under the hood, and I can see that everything starts at the point that where gdm forks starts a systemd --user process. It is this process that should be reading the user’s ~/.bash_profile; it’s not possible that that’s being done at this time.
Conclusion: My issue has nothing to do with Plasma or KDE. Thanks for the help getting to that point @skyfishgoo!
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Welp, I sorted this out some time ago, and I’m finally getting back to everyone to let anyone know exactly what the resolution to it was.
tl;dr I’m an idiot. 
The much longer version for those of you who are more patient is that, first, I’m using Fedora Workstation as my baseline. That distro is built around the Gnome DE, but I wanted to get a look at KDE Plasma, so I installed the “KDE Plasma Workspaces” dnf group. Doing nothing else other than picking “Plasma” in the GDM Greeter “Gear” menu is what got me to the point I was at.
Someone very patient soul over on the Fedora discussion forum suggested that I try it by enabling SDDM and disabling GDM in systemd. So I did that.
On the next boot, I was presented with the SDDM greeter, but what I didn’t see for the longest time was that the DE pick menu is down on the lower left for this. I was looking for something like the gear on the lower right. There is no indication that there is an SDDM menu there; it’s just a text description with the text glyphs embedded over the background graphic. Nothing to make is stand out.
In any case, once I did see that this was a menu, and it was not an easy path that I took to even look for it to have been one—it involved looking at various SDDM conf files, I changed that menu to Plasma and voila! I was dumped into an environment that had processed my ~/.bash_profile at login time. Problem solved.
Thanks to all who viewed my thread, and who took the time an trouble to give me a hand figuring out how to solve it!