OK, I’ve been using this for a while now, and I’m thinking I can do a “my experience with KDE” that may or may not be helpful to future adopters.
With reference to https://github.com/unman/kde/blob/master/README.md I’ll explain some things that “threw me for a loop” during the process. A lot of this is super-simple stuff and may seem to belabor the obvious…but my perspective was in using an old, really highly modified KDE at work that I just didn’t want to screw with, and I have used Xubuntu for years at home. So xfce fits me like an old shoe, and perhaps being new to this I have something to add that will benefit another newbie who is just as clueless about “obvious” [to experienced KDErs] as I was.
The first picture: What I initially thought was the “desktop icon” is actually a picture of a screen capture widget (lower left, the really colorful rectangle). This is not actually an immediate-post-install picture, there has been some customization done, including the screen capture widget. Of course I didn’t have one of these and wanted to know why it wasn’t there. But even the real desktop icon doesn’t actually appear immediately post-install for the very good reason that it’s to help you switch desktops and if you only have one, there’s nothing for it to do. Under the picture there is text there that describes how to get to it. It actually IS visible in this picture but not very conspicuous. In this picture it’s actually the three faint gray rectangles between the Q menu and the colorful screen capture widget, and you can see the leftmost of the three is highlighted blue, the second has a centered darker gray rectangle inside it and the rightmost rectangle is empty. That indicates you’re “on” the first desktop (and it has a maximized window), the second has a large (but not fullscreen) window on it, and the third has nothing.
I recently found another path to creating additional desktops…go into System Settings (which will be in one of the pre-canned KDE menus at the top), select “Workspace Behavior” then “Virtual Desktops”. You can then add desktops here. Desktops can be displayed in one or more rows on the toolbar–I mean on the panel.
Perhaps, though, there’s little point to desktops. There’s an alternative called “activities.” Functionally it’s almost like a “second dimension” of desktops. You can have, say, six activities and three desktops…but you will end up with three desktops in each activity for a total of 18.
You can’t make desktops look different from each other–if you set one background, you’ve set them all. But you CAN make activities different from each other. So I basically went for one desktop and eight activities, and have a different background on each activity.
There’s an activity switcher you can put on the panel, too…it looks an awful lot like the desktop switcher, except that there’s no option there to use small, small icons and stack them on the panel. (You can fake it by making the setting for desktops, which will sometimes call the activities to do the same thing…but eventually the activities will revert to one row. Which is bad for me because I’m running dual monitors and when laid out in one row eight activities eats up over half the panel.)
From the second and third pictures: As near as I can tell combining windows as shown is not the default behavior. You can right click on a window in the panel, select “more options” and then “allow this window to be grouped” but once you do that, it seems to allow every window to be grouped. It doesn’t seem to allow for multiple groups of subcategories. I haven’t experimented with it much to be able to characterize it.
OK a couple more things before moving on. The pictures show a little thing clear up in the upper left. I have no idea what that is (but it looks similar to something that appears at the far lower right on the panel). It isn’t there by default whatever it is, so if you don’t see it, don’t fret.
And, there is a concept of a “widget.” A widget can appear on a desktop or on the panel. In fact a widget is the ONLY thing that can appear on a desktop, that won’t then appear on ALL of them. (And here I’m referring to the activity/Desktop combo, in my prior example of three Desktops and six activites there are 18 distinct desktops. I’m using capitalization to distinguish.) Like almost any windowing system you can put shortcuts on the desktop…but such will appear on every Desktop in every Activity. A widget is one Desktop on One Activity.
Right clicking on an empty area of the panel (hopefully it’s not full!) gives you the option to add widgets. In the default configuration a big thing pops up on the left side of the screen and you can scroll and select widgets. If you click and drag the widget to the right, it will go onto your desktop. If you just double click it ends up on the panel. I don’t believe you can change it afterwards (except, obviously, by deleting and redoing).
OK on to the menus. As mentioned there and here, xfce menus are a hot mess, but they are actively worked by the Qubes team, so they are laid out in a somewhat rational order (though you may be just like me in not particularly liking the order they chose–but it’s a reasonable one). The problem is it’s all too easy to end up with so many VMs that you have to scroll on the menu, and in the current xfce implementation, you can’t reorganize it. (There is a vastly better version of it in the works, worth checking out–it has a bit of hierarchy to it to tame scrolling and also favorites.)
By contrast the KDE menu starts out a mix of chaos and sense…but you can edit it.
In fact there are three menus. The default install gives you one in the lower left called the Application Launcher, with categories along the bottom (which you can configure: right mouse, “configure application Launcher”), This one shows colored qube icons and is a bit “big.” But if you right mouse on the blue Q before the menu pops up, you can select two alternate menus (show alternatives), one is a dashboard and the other is called the “Application Menu” which crams more stuff into the same real estate but isn’t as colorful (entries at the top level show no icons, at least not for me). I haven’t done much with the Dashboard. I usually use the application menu but could switch to the launcher, especially if my organization becomes “deep” (so that there are fewer top-level menu items).
You do not have to commit to one of these. A menu is a widget. That means you can add another menu to the panel, and set it up to be one of the alternatives. (I thought about putting a menu button on the desktop, but because it IS a widget, I’d have to do that eight times (1 Desktop x 8 Activities). (One thing I did paste was a shortcut to the Qube Manager, since I still use it a lot, and as a shortcut it appears everwhere.)
VERY IMPORTANT: between the 7th and eight pictures, there’s a snippet of code. You have to do what’s shown, or any edits you make to the menu will not stick. You’ll lose them immediately. If you do this and it still doesn’t work, try opening a terminal and echoing $XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP. If it’s something other than plasma or KDE, let us know, but whatever it is, is what you need to be comparing to (that’s how I discovered my system was using “plasma” here–thanks unman for updating this).
A couple of things to note. If you ever created a disposable VM template, and set it up so that there was a menu item right next to the other qubes that would launch a disposable VM (by setting appmenus-dispvm to 1 in the features–by the way this should be on the Settings gui somewhere)…that item is now gone from this menu, and what looks like the right menu button will in fact launch the disposable template VM. The correct item got filed as an application under the precanned KDE menus that appear at the top of the menu (by default). You can drag them to a more sensible location as described.
Another thing is, trying to drag top level items doesn’t work. No matter what little horizontal line highlights, when I drop the item I’m tying to move it ends up inside one of the other items as a submenu. If I do manage to get it right…it gets thrown at the bottom of the menu. There are arrow keys on the editor (and in the mouse context menu but that’s really cumbersome) to move items. ALso, dropping an item onto a separator avoids this (since separators don’t have menu children).
(Separators, by the way, only appear on the applications menu, not the applications launcher.)
In any case, you have the capability to, say, group application vms together in a “top level” folder. When you create the folder, you’ll probably want to change the icon; click on the sample shown in the editor and a window pops open with icons to choose from. I didn’t notice until recently that at the upper right you can select which kinds of choices are available. Standard Qubes icons have been built into this gallery.
The possibility of customizing menus by activity has been dangled. I have no idea how to do THAT, but I did figure out a less cumbersome way to put shortcuts on desktops that are unique.
Add the Quick Launcher widget to your desktop. And add a folder view widget as well. in dom0 create a folder (I named mine Folders); inside of this create a folder for each AppVM you might want a shortcut for.
Then, go into the application menu, and instead of using it to start the qube or apps within it, send to desktop. Once you’ve got everything you might want to do with a vm, configure the folder view widget to point to the folder you just created, then select the desktop icons and drag them into the folder view. Select move. That moves the shortcuts to the folder, off the desktop (where they, being shortcuts, would appear on every desktop). You can then drag things from the folder view to your new app launcher. You can title the app launcher to the name of the qube. Result: You have a white box that groups a bunch of shortcuts to one AppVM together, visually. (You can then get rid of the folder view widget without harming anything. Just DON’T delete the actual folder it was pointing to!)
No doubt you can think of variations on this that will suit you better. And there’s a decent chance I’ll decide I like something better. This is a journey, not a destination.
)