yess KDE is working! the problem was that KDE doesn’t work if you only install plasma-meta and plasma-desktop - you have to also install at least one of the packages in plasma-x11-session (I think the specific package needed might be kwin-x11)

I added a note about that in the Arch Wiki discussion page and hopefully someone will make the edit so no one else has to go through troubleshooting this lol

@kasdeya we believe on arch the convention is that anything that ends in `-session` is the core package you need to install that will pull in everything else yeah. we remember the openbox package being similar from when we used that?

@tempest @kasdeya i believe this is specifically the issue with kwin, because they split kwin up into x11 and wayland packages separately, and x11 is no longer the kde default.

as seen on the arch news: https://archlinux.org/news/plasma-640-will-need-manual-intervention-if-you-are-on-x11/

@nellePoint @kasdeya ahh that would make sense

@tempest @kasdeya the wiki should probably be updated to reflect this

regardless the news section on the website is always a great place to look first if you have any new problems

@tempest ohh - huh! so I don’t actually need to have plasma-meta marked as manually installed, in that case? this is really good to know

tbh I’m having such a hard time navigating the package lists. if I run something as simple as pacman -Ss firefox I get literally dozens of packages, most of which are only tangentially related to Firefox at best

so often I’ll just do pacman -Si <whatever I need> and if it looks about right then I’ll install it and hope there wasn’t a better alternative package somewhere :/

edit: so it looks like plasma-meta optionally includes plasma-x11-session! I wonder if pacman asked me if I wanted to install this at one point and I just skipped past it. it was asking me a lot of questions that I didn’t understand lol