r/voidlinux • u/Sufficient-Eye-3221 • 8d ago

solved Packages and process I needed to install KDE Plasma + Pipewire on Void Linux

I struggled a bit coming from another distro (sorry, I suck at tech) but finally got everything working. I want to document what I did in case anyone else has issues too. I think some packages that KDE Plasma needed were unintuitive so hopefully this can show up on Google and help others with this issue.

I also had issues getting a display manager working (I tried Ly, LightDM, greetd, and SDDM) but I found a simple one called emptty that gets the job done, so these instructions include setting that up. In the end, following these steps should give you a functional display manager, desktop environment, and audio. This was on an AMD Thinkpad in August 2026.

For partitions during the install, I selected:

  • 1G boot (FAT I think) on /boot/efi
  • 75G Btrfs on /
  • 4G swap
  • remaining Btrfs on /home

Here are the packages I installed via sudo xbps-install -S

  • dbus
  • elogind
  • kde-plasma
  • kde-baseapps
  • emptty
  • qt5-wayland
  • qt6-wayland
  • libstdc++
  • xorg
  • NetworkManager
  • mesa-dri
  • seatd

Then I enabled the following services via the standard sudo ln -s /etc/sv/<service> /var/service

  • dbus
  • emptty
  • NetworkManager

Then I rebooted. You can just do sudo reboot if the desktop environment isn't up yet.

After rebooting, I followed the audio instructions for PipeWire and PulseAudio here (https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/media/pipewire.html). Then I wrote a short start-up script with just

#!/bin/bash

pipewire &

Then I went to autostart options in KDE menu and selected that script to run on login, and rebooted again, and everything worked pretty well. I might have missed a package somewhere but I'm pretty sure this was everything.

If anything goes wrong, you can drop into the TTY with CTRL-ALT-F2 to fix it, and switch back to the desktop environment with CTRL-ALT-F7. And you can switch to root with su -, and then back to your user with exit.

Hope that helps someone 💜

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1

u/Legitimate-Draw-2235 8d ago

Nice one

1

u/Sufficient-Eye-3221 7d ago

Thanks 😁 Really enjoying Void so far

1

u/tacosmanager 7d ago

you actually don't need to enable elogind, dbus will already start it!!

1

u/Sufficient-Eye-3221 7d ago

Looks like you're right, thank you! I could have sworn I'd tried it without elogind enabled and it hadn't worked...

1

u/ElderberryNo4220 4d ago

You don't need 1GB for /boot/EFI, just set it to around 256MB, that would be plenty for most purpose. Also, you can use `/bin/sh` instead of bash in the startup script, sh is slightly lighter weight, but it shouldn't make too difference.