KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth generation desktop environment from KDE. KDE plasma requires less space and has a higher response rate. Meaning that you can run KDE in low space and feel the great user experience and smoothness. KDE plasma has a great look and feel, fresh and eye-catching icons, animations, customizable, and many pleasing features.

For this article, we have the latest installation of Arch Linux 5.10.4 with XFCE desktop. We are going to install KDE Plasma 5.20.4 on it.

Prerequisites

Arch Linux installed with any desktop environment having a sudo user. You need at least one sudo user to install the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Install KDE on Arch Linux

First, upgrade Arch Linux using the package manager 'pacman' in your Arch Linux. Open terminal and type the following command.

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Now, install the following packages:

plasma - Desktop environment for KDE
sddm - Display manager for KDE plasma
kde-application - For various KDE applications

$ sudo pacman -S plasma sddm kde-applications

You will be asked to choose the packages, you can simply proceed with default values.

When the installation finished, check your current display manager by executing the following command.

$ file /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

In my case the display manager is lightdm. It might be different and depends on what you have used while installing Arch Linux.

We should disable the current display manager. Just Grab the name of the display manager from output and disable it by executing the following command.