Plasma workspace build succeeded. Now how to run?

Development
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1

I have successfully built the workspace group with kde-builder. That is, kde-builder workspace completed building with no errors.

Now, I want to run the desktop session, but not sure how to do this correctly in my case. I have built this on a machine with a minimal base Arch Linux system, so there is no other install of Plasma, no SDDM, or any other graphical system.

As per the instructions, I source the ~/kde/build/plasma-workspace/prefix.sh script. It is at this point that I am not sure what to do. Running plasmashell --replace doesn’t work, as obviously there is no current session to replace.

I have tried running startplasma-wayland which seems to start Kwin. I see the Plasma splash screen appear for quite a long time, before it goes to an ‘empty’ session (black screen, but if I move the mouse to the top left corner I can bring up the desktop switching interface).

I’ve also tried dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland but with the same result.

I’m not sure where to go from here, please help.

2

You should have a new Plasma development session listed in a desktop file in /usr/share/wayland-sessions. If for whatever reason you don’t have it, you can trigger installing it with kde-builder --install-login-session-only. It’s in login-sessions/plasmawayland-dev.desktop.cmake · master · Plasma / Plasma Workspace · GitLab.

I don’t know how it works when you don’t use a login manager to run it, but it shows the exact command used to run it.

3

Even after running kde-builder --install-login-session-only, no files appear in this directory. It seems to do nothing, no logs are generated, nothing.

4

You should see a generated desktop file matching what i linked above present in ~/kde/build/plasma-workspace/login-sessions I believe. That’s the file that kde-builder would install to /usr/share/wayland-sessions.

5

Yes, there are a few desktop files there. I tried the commands in both plasma.desktop and plasmawayland-dev6.desktop. I still get the same results. The splash screen appears for about 30 seconds, before disappearing and leaving a mouse cursor on a black background.