KDE Plasma

KDE Plasma is a fast, customizable desktop environment designed to be simple by default but powerful when needed.

Installation

Plasma Desktop

To install the Plasma desktop environment on NixOS, the following options should be added to your configuration.nix (or flake.nix if you so desire).

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{

  # SDDM Display Manager
  services.displayManager.sddm.enable = true;

  # Plasma 5 (*deprecated* - unavailable after 25.05)
  services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true;

  # Plasma 6
  services.desktopManager.plasma6.enable = true;

  # Exclude certain default applications from being installed
  environment.plasma6.excludePackages = with pkgs; [ kdePackages.<package> ]; 

}

Extensions and Themes

Ordinarily, Plasma extensions and themes should be installed through the Plasma Settings application, though a small number have been packaged in Nixpkgs for convenience. These can be found in the Nixpkgs repo or by using search.nixos.org.

If you plan to use Qt 5 applications on Plasma 6, you should enable the Qt 5 integration. This allows theming to be more cohesive across Qt5 and Qt6 applications.

services.desktopManager.plasma6.enableQt5Integration = true;

SDDM Configuration

Configuration of the SDDM login manager is done in the usual way through the NixOS module.

Example Configuration

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{config, pkgs, ... }:
{
<...>
  services.displayManager.sddm = {
    enable = true;
    theme = "breeze";
    wayland.enable = true;
    enableHidpi = true;
    settings = {
      Autologin = {
        Session = "plasma.desktop";
        User = "john";
      };
    };
  };
<...>
}

Any options not directly configurable in the NixOS module can be passed to SDDM via:

services.displayManager.sddm.settings = { <...> };