I’ve iterated through a lot of desktop setups over the years: bspwm, i3, XFCE, older Plasma setups, and various half-scripted one-off configurations that were nice for a month and painful to recreate six months later. The current Dotfiles repository is the first one that feels both pleasant to use every day and reproducible enough to survive a fresh install.

The core idea is simple:

• use GNU Stow for normal config files
• use konsave for Plasma state that does not map cleanly to a few tracked files
• keep the desktop tiling-focused without giving up Plasma’s hardware support, Wayland support, notifications, portals, and general ecosystem

Philosophy

KDE Plasma already solves a lot of the hard problems that standalone tiling window managers push back onto the user: display configuration, power management, desktop portals, Bluetooth, notifications, file associations, settings UIs, and solid application compatibility. What I wanted was not to replace Plasma, but to make it behave more like a tiling environment.

Krohnkite is the key piece here. It runs as a KWin script, so you get tiling behavior inside Plasma instead of bolting a different window-management model on top of the desktop.

Quick Setup

The setup is meant to be close to one-shot on a fresh machine.

1. Install required tools

pip install konsave

You also need stow, since the repo uses stow packages for the ordinary config files.

2. Install required Plasma packages

On CachyOS or Arch:

yay -S darkly-bin kwin-effect-rounded-corners-git kwin-scripts-krohnkite-git \  colloid-icon-theme-git plasma6-applets-wallhaven-reborn-git

That set covers the visual layer and the window-management behavior the profile expects:

• Darkly for the Qt application style
• rounded corners for softer window edges
• Krohnkite for tiling
• Colloid icons
• the Wallhaven wallpaper plugin used by the setup

3. Clone and install

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Blacksuan19/Dotfiles ~/.dotfilescd ~/.dotfilesbash install.sh

install.sh stows the config packages and then asks whether to apply the Plasma-Round konsave profile. Answering y restores the full desktop state in one shot.

4. Bootstrap for a fresh machine

If the machine is truly fresh, run:

~/.scripts/bootstrap.sh

That script handles the annoying setup steps you only want to do once:

• interactive git identity setup
• sane git defaults
• chaotic-AUR configuration
• package installation through yay

The package list is stored in scripts/.scripts/packages-arch.txt, so it is easy to keep the bootstrap path versioned as well.

What Plasma-Round Restores

The Plasma-Round profile is a snapshot of the full Plasma environment. This is what makes the repo more than just a pile of dotfiles.

Themes and visuals

KWin scripts and effects

Plasmoids

KDE config captured by konsave

The profile restores a wide chunk of ~/.config/, including:

• kdeglobals for global KDE settings
• kglobalshortcutsrc for all global shortcuts
• kwinrc and kwinrulesrc for compositor, tiling, and per-window rules
• plasmarc and plasmashellrc for panel and shell behavior
• plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc for applet layout and config
• breezerc, ksplashrc, krunnerrc, klipperrc, spectaclerc, and more
• GTK 3 and GTK 4 config for cross-toolkit visual consistency

That is the important distinction here: stow handles files that are naturally file-shaped, while konsave captures the larger Plasma state that would otherwise require manual clicking after every reinstall.

Color System and Theme Switching

One of the better parts of the setup is that the desktop color behavior is not static. Plasma uses the active wallpaper’s colors to tint the wider desktop, so the accent system updates as wallpapers change.

For code editors and the terminal, the setup uses Ayu in both Light and Dark variants, and switches them with the system theme.

The repo also carries two custom global themes, Dark Mode and Light Mode, which can be toggled manually or tied into Plasma’s automatic scheduling.

Dark	Light

Stow Packages

Each top-level directory, excluding screens/, is a stow package mirroring part of $HOME.

This is the part I like most structurally: the repo has a clear boundary between generic config packages and KDE-specific desktop state.

Keybindings

All major shortcuts are stored in the konsave profile and restored automatically.

Why This Setup Has Stuck

The useful part is not just that it looks good. It is that the whole machine is recoverable. I do not need to remember which hidden config file controls which behavior or spend half a day rebuilding panels, shortcuts, and desktop state.

stow covers the normal config surface. konsave covers the Plasma-specific surface. Together they make the desktop feel reproducible instead of fragile.