CentOS 8 installation of KDE Plasma (5.18)

I tried CentOS 8 right after its release, as it is one of the systems I have been using for years, on servers, workstations and desktops.

The new CentOS 8 operating system is available in two different ISOs: the well-known CentOS Linux, the traditional, stable RHEL-based operating system, and the CentOS Stream. The new CentOS Stream according to the developers is described as a platform that is between the Fedora distribution and RHEL.

Immediately after the first installation I discovered that the distribution update did not support KDE. So I had to "live" with GNOME which does not offer flexibility in HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) like the one in KDE.

I tried to install KDE before it was released in the official repos of CentOS 8. The result it was satisfactory but not perfect.

So today I did a fresh installation of CentOS 8 and managed to install KDE Plasma in version 5.18.

Let's see how:

First we need to install the epel repository which contains thousands of packages that do not exist in the CentOS repository.

dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/warm/warm-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

Make a dnf update

dnf update

We are ready for installation

dnf --enablerepo=epel, PowerTools group -y install "KDE Plasma Workspaces" "base-x"

You can also enable PowerTools with the following command

dnf config-manager --enable PowerTools

Reboot and in Login select Plasma