Hi and thanks, I am reaching the "end-of-life" with my current KDE distro (mint) it is on KDE 4. I have heard I cannot use another window manager with Plasma 5, is this correct? I use KDE as I have found the tools superior and the desktop is still customizable, but I use Awesome as my WM on 4 I had no problem and could even keep the taskbar so I had the nice KDE menus, use of the taskbar etc. From what I am reading the methods to use Awesome with KDE would not allow the KDE desktop to exist at all. This leaves me with others like Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE. None of these compare to Plasma. Please tell me there is a way to make this happen. Thanks for any help in advance.

Side note. I have used 4 on the current distro for around 4 years with like barely any issues at all. It has been awesome literally. I would like to continue that run.

thanks

I apologize for issue bump, but I posted 6 days ago and not even a view, someone must know how to use Plasma 5 with a different window manager and still keep the functionality of the other aspects of KDE. Instead of sending me to the basement and having to use other desktops. All help is appreciated.

thanks

I did see this earlier and intend to reply after doing a little further investigation.

Hi,
You could take a look at Trisquel, download the netinstall package.
After the installation you could also install kde-minimal which is not Plasma at all.

Although you can take a look at this post.
https://community.kde.org/Distributions

Did you explore KaOs and Chakra?
Regards

Hi and thanks both of you. I will give look at this suggestion, I would like to see how stripped it is and what is left. I love the flexibility that I got with KDE and the quality of the tools, another of the items although seemingly trivial was the ability to slideshow random wallpapers on multiple screens with different timings. I have amassed a sick collection of approximately 27000 wallpapers of all types, it keeps my view interesting as I sit 12-14 hours a day behind a computer. That aside I am reaching an end-of-life on my mint KDE and will have to to a complete build and there is a lot of customization. I use awesome as the window manager and I have also had most else of KDE like the menus and also the different notifications etc. I love my current desktop and would loathe not being able to do it again. So all the help you can offer is appreciated. thanks again, I will let you know.

Doing some investigation, led to https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/c ... b054256ade which is the removal of the Window Manager selector from System Settings. The rationale it seems is that the options that the selector was able to provide as being officially supported for Plasma had been reduced to basically OpenBox. Thus to reduce the maintenance burden on KDE/Plasma devs they removed the option and official support so they can focus solely on KWin as being the Display Manager for Plasma.

However, it looks like there are still options for setting up your own custom desktop setup using another window manager. In the above commit, he mentions "If someone still wants to change WM it's still possibly my modifying the KDEWM environment envariable."

I also dug up a couple pages which have information you may find useful:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6 ... _managers/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KD ... ow_manager