Good day,

As the title says, I'm just getting started in Linux. I am coming from Windows 10 for most of the common reasons and I won't bore you with specifics. Needless to say, there are a few things that "Only run on Windows" that I can't really ditch, so I am in a position to either stick it out with windows, or dual boot and learn something new - I favor the 2nd option with making my main install Linux and windows "As and when it's needed"

Anyway, enough of the waffling. I tried a number of different flavors but while they were pretty, I felt out of control on what I wanted to have as apps (felt like I was back in windows and having their preferred apps shoved my way), so I thought to start with a fresh sheet of paper, I settled on Arch. Was it the right choice, well I'm learning every day and got a system up and running (thanks google and youtube). Then it came to a desktop environment and this is where I fell upon KDE and Plasma 5.20.2 as they have a reputation for customizing everything.

Here's where I'm at, and I'm getting lost - I'm looking for a breakdown of how everything is working in the environment, what's connected to what. I don't like the start menu (Windows term sorry), I would like to change it completely - how would I go about that? for example, how would one change the menu to an app tiled setup similar to windows 10 that supports drag and drop apps into it (if not drag and drop then adding via a menu).
I know a bit of C++, haven't touched Qt before, but willing to learn. I would love to code like visual basic used to do - prepare the UI layout first then code the individual elements.

I like some elements of windows 10 that I would like to replicate but not do a clone (saw a recent review on youtube on a linux distro with windows clothing on and I thought - nope!).

I'll keep this to one question (have plenty) but just want to get cracking with customising.

Thanks for reading

Wodger

EDIT: after posting I stumbled upon "Win10Build" which has some of the elements I'm looking for, however on delving into the git master only find mostly icons, As I read they are using several Plasmoids, but I can't really find lots of info on them - I will start digging into them. https://store.kde.org/p/1363026/

So I thought I would update with a reply post on where I am now.

After digging around in a plasmoid and coming across several .qml files. I opened a couple of these .qml files to have a look inside with notepad ++ (Yes I'm still in Windows at the moment - but that's a story that's not really on-topic but related to hardware failure). Anyway, I started to see some similarities with C++ and after some googling discovered QML is an offshoot of C++ specifically for UI.

I then proceeded to download QT creator open-source version that as far as I understand has several requirements to fulfill to use/distribute content - still trying to figure that out but what I discovered was a great youtube tutorial series done by Jesper Pederson of Kdap - Introduction to Qt / QML - I would like to link the playlist in this post if a mod would care to jump in and tell me if that's OK (but you can find it on youtube search easily enough). I'm about halfway through the to date posted series with more videos promised, but it gives a basis on which to start coding UI using QT creator. It also allows me to start picking apart some of the examples in Plasma to then start creating my own.

If anyone has any additional resources I can view to help develop, please let me know.

Thanks,

Wodger

Hi all again,

So I'e set up a virtualbox session with my planned dual boot system (once my new drives arrive in a few weeks perhaps) and started playing around with plasmoids. One thing I have encountered using QT creator is as long as you give the locations for the plugins used, it doesn't complain, so now I've found most of them alot of errors on the code have gone away. I am however stuck and despite me googling a great deal I seem to be missing a few of these plugins:

plasmoid 2.0, Kquickcontrolsaddons 2.0 and kscreen 1.0 (thats just on one of the plasmoids I opened up with QT creator).

Theres not alot of documentation detailing what these plugins do nor where to get them, going outside QT creator and running one of the plasmoids in terminal command (plasmaviewer I think?) just for the startmenu (kicker) throws a few errors up in console about depreciated commands.

Is there anyone who can point me in the right direction? - There have been several posts about similar things over the last few years on this forum with none to very few people putting a reply.

I will keep going besides the problems, but if someone could help clear these errors or link to a description of what these plugins actually do that are throwing QT creator into a tiz, it would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Wodger

Edit: So just after I posted I found some documentation on plasmoid 2.0 on the plasma framework - but it doesn't tell you where this plugin is located

Hello and welcome to the arch wonderland

First of all, I do not know Windows 10, nor any youtube-video related to this topic, so I just ignore these things

wodger wrote:I don't like the start menu (Windows term sorry), I would like to change it completely - how would I go about that?

The easiest way is to righclick the current one and click on «Alternatives…». I do personally not use a menu like this, as we have KRunner which is a lot faster.

(if not drag and drop then adding via a menu).
I know a bit of C++, haven't touched Qt before, but willing to learn. I would love to code like visual basic used to do - prepare the UI layout first then code the individual elements.

To use drag and drop in Qt you can stay to C++ if you want to. Have a look at subclassing QFrame. Qt provides an example for it: Draggable Icons Example. The Qt-Examples are always a good place to start.
Although you can use the DesignEditor to create a UI-layout, it is not always the best approach. Consider generating a list of QActions/Buttons with a loop instead of manually adressing them one by one.
To switch over to QML: Simple things are provided through JavaScript directly (including SQLite-Support), but for a lot of stuff you have to provide the C++-side yourself, thats why I think it is better to start in C++ and after knowing details of signals/slots and view/model-representation, you can switch over to use QML. Or make it vice versa. It's up to you

A starting point for plasmoids would be here: KDE Techbbase:Plasma5 QML2 Getting Started, but I think you already know this.

…plasmoid 2.0, Kquickcontrolsaddons 2.0 and kscreen 1.0 (thats just on one of the plasmoids I opened up with QT creator).…

These names in QML are provided usually by registering a class with qmlRegisterType. The KDE-stuff can easily be installed with pacman. I provide you two links to know how to find out the package names, as found on the KDE Community:
Development — Get Involved
Guidelines and HOWTOs/Build from source/Install the dependencies
You do not need everything described there, but the more you get, the more your QtCreator will provide

If you need something explicit, keep asking. I'm not an expert, I'm still learning the basics myself as there is much more to know than only C++-Syntax.

@koffeinfriedhof I would like to thank you for replying, I just had an unfortunate experience over on stack overflow which has pretty much put me off posting on the platform completely, despite the knowledge that is likely there, the people hoarding it are just plain spiteful and I can have none of that behavior.

Anyway, back onto what you wrote - Great! - As you have seen my adventures so far have been up and down (lately they have been down) but I'm still wanting to make the switch to Linux despite these annoying setbacks. I do wish there was more to go on (some of the tutorials don't explain a lot like how or why) - I only know C++ as a passing language but I think I can piece together something doing what I have been doing which is "try it and break it" or in other words keep trying things until it works.

I think this brings this post to a close. I will continue my adventures and will as you say "keep asking". Perhaps eventually I might put something up that will help more people create better performing / better looking desktops - I think getting people started is the key thing, thats what I am struggling with at the moment, once over that hurdle, the rest is easy.

Thanks again

Wodger

Your welcome

I'm also trying this for years now. It is not just learning one or two programming languages, the hard part is to put it all together to get the result you want. That's why I suggested to start with the Qt-Examples until you feel comfortable with it. KDE-Software is based on it and provides a lot more abstractions to provide a shareable system for all KDE-Applications.
And the main goal is always: have fun!