Are you using these KDE Plasma widgets to enhance your user experience? We tell you the most useful options here.

KDE Plasma is a fantastic desktop environment. It is popular for its feature set that allows a user to customize the experience, add widgets, and multiply the usefulness of the desktop with various elements.

When you get started, you already have certain widgets in place to access things. You can customize/remove them or add some more pre-installed ones. In either case, you can also download widgets from the KDE store and try them out.

Here, I mention some of my favorite picks among the default, pre-installed, and downloadable widgets.

  • @NorthWestWind
    11•1 month ago

    I was messing with the sticky notes widget the other day. I wanted to see how many can I add to the panel, so I spam clicked it 5 times and it froze the entire plasmashell.

    I had to manually edit the plasma config file to remove them or else plasmashell just never worked.

    After fixing plasmashell, I tried to add 1 sticky note again, and plasmashell froze again. So I just never touched it ever after.

  • @[email protected]
    6•1 month ago

    Neat, there were a couple I hadn’t heard of. One of the things I like to do is to use the Icons-only Task Manager on a panel that’s been shrunk to the smallest size possible. Voila, an application dock.

    • Mactan
      3•1 month ago

      I had them ducking too for a while but it messed with full screen apps enough I put it back to always up

  • @Majestix
    6•1 month ago

    I didn’t know about the Global Menu Bar, pretty neat.

  • @[email protected]
    3•1 month ago

    I want to like Plasma, really I do, but even when I haven’t chosen it as a DE it overheats my laptop because Baloo File Extractor just won’t fucking quit consuming a CPU core for what seems like hours a day.

    I get it; pre-emptive aggressive indexing of files now to save CPU cycles in the future. But I have a lot of files and that future never comes for me.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 month ago

      I want to like Plasma, really I do, but even when I haven’t chosen it as a DE it overheats my laptop because Baloo File Extractor just won’t fucking quit consuming a CPU core for what seems like hours a day.

      I remember having this issue. Basically, it was a bug, where baloo file manager was stuck on a file. After some time (and maybe a reinstall?), and deleting the index, baloo worked fine.