Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)faq icon

1. What is KDE?

KDE is an umbrella brand encompassing technologies created by the KDE community. KDE SC (KDE Software Compilation) is a leading desktop environment for Linux and UNIX platforms. It is includes a workspace, a collection of programs and supporting technologies.

The homepage for the project is at www.kde.org

An official introduction is found at www.kde.org/whatiskde/

2. How do I install KDE?

The easiest way is to install task-kde-desktop.
To have your localization, you can install task-XXXX-kde-desktop, replacing XXXX with your language.
By default Debian will install the recommended packages. Some online guides advice against installing them. Doing that will probably lead to a suboptimal user experience.

3. How do I use KDE on a phone or tablet?

Besides installing the KDE task, you need to install plasma-mobile.
If you only have a touch screen and there is no option to insert the password using a virtual keyboard, you need to install qtvirtualkeyboard-plugin.

4. I can't install KDE because of package dependency problems.

Typically Debian doesn't have package dependency problems until something messes it up. Dependency problems and broken packages are extremely rare when using a stable Debian release such as Stretch. Testing and Unstable releases are slightly more prone to these problems, as they have not been through the rigorous level of testing and there may be packaging problems in the repository, meaning that (especially with unstable/Sid), KDE may not always be in an installable state. A workaround is to install the kde-core meta package and pick the rest of the needed applications manually.

If you have installed backports of some package onto Debian Stable, and your backport package overwrote a stable package which the KDE stable packages depend on, then you may not be able to install KDE on your system, until you remove the backported package. This is also highly unsupported

5. When I remove one application, my whole KDE is deleted!

If you installed all KDE with the task-kde-desktop package, you have installed a metapackage, and all its dependencies (kdebase, kdenetwork, kdegraphics, etc.), but the metapackage itself is empty.

If after this, you remove one application, you will see that more packages will be removed. This doesn't means that all your utils and all your desktop will be removed, just means that you no longer have your complete set of utils, and the whole KDE applications.

Using aptitude it's a bit different. If you installed the kde metapackage using aptitude, the rest of packages installed as dependencies of kde, are marked as automatically installed. Then, if you remove one of this dependencies (for example, kwrite), it will remove everything (because they are marked as automatically installed).

If you don't want those packages removed, mark them as manually installed (with aptitude unmarkauto or pressing m (lowercase) in GUI mode when the package name is highlighted).

6. I can't decrypt some messages with KMail

You probably are missing the gnupg-agent package. Read the document about using OpenPGP and PGP/MIME in the KMail website. Install pinentry-qt and gpg-agent and after that, configure GPG as explained in the HOWTO. Restart X to make sure /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent is run.