I’m new to KDE Plasma and am facing an issue with Wi-Fi settings. The Wi-Fi icon is not visible in the system tray, and I can’t find any mention of “Wi-Fi” or “Wireless” in System Settings. However, my Wi-Fi connects automatically after booting.
Some details about my setup:
I was previously using the Wayland environment with Zorin OS, where the Wi-Fi icon was visible.
I can switch between Zorin (Wayland) and KDE Plasma, and under Wayland, the icon is visible.
Here are my two main questions:
How do I make the Wi-Fi settings or icon visible in KDE Plasma?
How can I manually switch between different Wi-Fi access points in KDE?
Hi! If you open the System Settings application, is there a Network or Wi-Fi section present there? Can you also specify what steps you took to install KDE Plasma on Zorin OS? (It’s possible not everything required for a complete Plasma desktop was successfully installed)
As a couple of general notes:
Installing two different desktop environments (like Zorin’s custom version of the GNOME desktop environment, which is what is shown as “Zorin Wayland”) on the same device, and especially for the same user, can be pretty messy in my experience - they can end up “competing” for settings and throwing each other off a bit
Zorin OS 17 is based on Ubuntu 22.04, which has a 2+ year old version of KDE Plasma in its software repositories. If you end up being interested in using Plasma more long-term, I might suggest looking for a Linux distribution that offers more up-to-date versions of software. Much of what’s included in that distribution will be out of support from the upstream developers, and will rely on manual patching from either Ubuntu maintainers or the Zorin OS team
Having said all that - if you find something you like and that works for you, go for it! But I wanted to mention those points so, if you’re still exploring operating system + desktop options, you had that context.
One thing folks in the comments of that noted is that if the intent is to basically recreate Kubuntu from an existing Ubuntu installation, installing the kubuntu-desktop package for Ubuntu might be the fastest way to accomplish that - although I’ll give the caveat that it’s still going to be mixed-and-matched components under one user account, so it still won’t quite be reflective of the experience you’d get from a “clean” installation of one or the other.
It might specifically be worth making sure that the plasma-nm package is correctly installed, as well, as that would contain the integration between Plasma’s network connections controls and the underlying NetworkManager service.
This would likely be a good situation to post on the Zorin Forum also, in case there are more folks there who have run into this specific situation trying to navigate around Ubuntu and Zorin’s packaging and custom configurations.
