Hi,
I’ve spent the last couple weeks writing and fine-tuning an “automagic” post-installation script that turns a minimal Rocky Linux 8 installation into a full-blown KDE desktop with bells and whistles.
Check it out: Nicolas Kovacs / Rocky Linux 8.x Desktop Setup · GitLab
Post your remarks and/or suggestions here in this thread.
Cheers from the sunny South of France,
Niki
PS : here’s the script as well as a screenshot.
Here’s a detailed blog article (in french) about this setup:
Sûrement “Voici un article de blog détaillé (en français) sur cette configuration:” Non !? !!! … ( feigned indignation )
Ain’t Google great ? … well, when they’re not making/releasing the next version of Android when the last one isn’t finished yet… but then that’s the CI/CD world we live suffer in …
But on KDE … the situation with kde / rhel et al is … BAD. Epel 8 currently includes a version betwixt 2 LTS versions which is no longer supported - ok except you can’t address any issues you encounter at all ( no point / maybe fixed / won’t entertain etc ) and obviously there is no reliable maintenance of updates to kde in EPEL so even if it was a supported version ur not getting fixes or security patches…
I will be forced shortly to embrace macOS so it’s not a huge issue for me in the short term but to continue with rhel I’m going to have to ultimately try / attempt / look into setting up an automated build of kde myself at some point (ideally with regression tests) … or maybe a canoe and a paddle and off to the wilderness - at least I’d have a paddle. …
…but seriously, I will more likely never get around to it and ultimately end up only using rhel for servers.
I stand corrected: Epel 8 KDE blocked, in testing, what the future holds…(rhel bugzilla issue 2133188)
I gave that a try in a virtual machine, but the upgrade failed due to missing dependencies.
That’s why it is in testing. And you can’t even join the testing until Rocky 8.7 is out.
But when 8.7 is out you have to update everything in one go: Rocky, KDE, Nvidia drivers, …
Maybe some of your custom builds also need rebuilding …
Speaking of KDE… I just discovered that Dolphin file manager
dolphin.x86_64 21.08.3-1.el9
(installed as default in Rocky 9 KDE distro) has a serious bug - cannot write to SMB shares! 
If I install the Konqueror package and use that to manually browse the same SMB share, there is no problem writing. I found there is a KDE bug that I tried to re-open, but I guess my note there is still pending (as its vanished)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445976
my error : Could not rename partial file smb://nas.local/MiddleEarth/misc/zoom.txt.part.
Please check permissions.
Yes but the main point is that despite recent appearances it is maintained and you will eventually get the 5.24 (LTS) version in RHEL 8.7 (hopefully) and you will get patches. We’re just at a bump in the road just like we were with RHEL 8.5 where you couldn’t run KDE at all.
