Installing Katana on Arch Linux

[VictorTheVictor]

Hello, I am quite new to working with projects outside of the official Arch repositories or the AUR. I wanted to try this desktop environment on Arch Linux because it is exactly what I was looking for in a desktop environment. Could you please help me get Katana set up on Arch Linux? I tried following a tutorial from someone on Endeavor OS, and many packages were not found on the official repos nor the AUR.

[CombineSoldier14]

Firstly, make sure KDE Plasma (the modern one) isn't installed on your computer as Katana will conflict with it.

You need to start by building Katie (use my patch over fluxer's one since I fixed some bugs while building) which has PKGBUILDs for Arch Linux under packaging/archlinux Clone the repo then when in the same directory as the PKGBUILD run makepkg -si.

After that, you can continue on with the main Katana repo. Clone this one and the next packages are again under packaging/archlinux, and you will repeat the same process for all of them as above in this order:

katanalibs
ariya-icons
katana-l10n
katana-workspace

After that, you should be done. Log out and your login manager should present you with a "KDE Plasma" session.

[4194304]

works perfectly on an updated system as of today (02/01/25)

[4194304]

To clone and compile from BitBucket on Arch, Debian, or whatever the other distro is, do the following:

First of all, you'll need Qt4. On Arch, install it from the AUR, and it'll compile after around half an hour or so. You should also have CMake. Also uninstall newer or older versions of KDE Plasma, as they'll conflict with Katana.

Now you should be able to compile from here successfully. Optionally for organization, you can also create a folder to store everything you're going to compile.

Then, cd into the folder you created if you did that, and clone these repositories from BitBucket:

https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/ariya-icons
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/katana
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/katie
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/kde-extraapps
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/kde-l10n
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/kdelibs
https://bitbucket.org/smil3y/kde-workspace

For all of those, find the packaging folder and run the package building scripts. I would HIGHLY recommend compiling everything at once, unless you're on a laptop or low end machine for the purpose of saving time. KDE L10N, libs, and workspace for me took the longest, where all at once, they compiled in around 20 minutes or so. This will likely vary GREATLY depending on your hardware (my computer is decently powerful).

While compiling, keep a close eye to see where everything is. You will get password prompts.

From there, use your display manager to select KDE, or if you're using xinit, add exec startkde to your .xinitrc file.

While configuring, you may experience a few crashes. It's normal as the project is being developed (Katie was updated 6 days ago), and to fix it, simply kill the desktop or stop your display manager.

Other than that, your experience should be pretty smooth. I switched yesterday and so far I have definitely been happy with my experience apart from a few small quirks and inconsistencies.