 Most of you probably know about Plasma or Plasma Shell, which is KDE's flagship desktop shell. However, most of you probably don't know about Liquid or Liquid Shell, which is another desktop shell that KDE has. And this is actually a KDE project. I've actually shown on this channel before like TDE or even Maui Shell. Those were other desktops that were close to KDE, but are not actually part of KDE. This is fully part of KDE. You can also see from their GitHub page which is inside of KDE. So we are sure about that. And the cool thing is that this is a shell. And what that means is that as an example, it's not a desktop environment. It doesn't come with a window manager. The window manager is KWin, just like Plasma Shell. And it's actually the very same one. So all of the things that work on the newer KDE Plasma KWin part of things work here as well. So we've got a new overview as an example. It's just like you would accept and everything else just works out of the box. What actually changes is the desktop shell, which is like the background and the panel. You can see that the panel is completely different. And also there's this feature that allows you to have different wallpapers depending on the virtual desktop. But I'm getting my head on myself. So why would you want to use Liquid Shell anyway? What's the difference between Plasma Shell and Liquid Shell? Now, in order to know the difference between those two, you need to know the difference between QML and QT widgets. So historically speaking, KDE has always used QT widgets because QML didn't exist yet. QML came later. It was made by QT. And it is a markup language similar to HTML and CSS to some extent. That relies on JavaScript as well. And it is meant to make building UIs much easier. And it is much easier to use QML compared to QT widgets, in my opinion, if you don't know, like C++ very well. So KDE Plasma was actually rewritten completely in QML. And everything nowadays, even the UI of the newer KDE applications is written in QML. Discover, as an example, is in QML. And this shell says no. You know what? QT widgets were actually fine. And it just keeps them. So what you're seeing here in the panel is actually drawn using QT widgets. If you use KVanTum, if you don't skip this part, if you use KVanTum, you might be wondering why some KDE apps don't follow the KVanTum style. And that's because KVanTum is meant to theme QT widgets. This is QT widgets. KDE Plasma and newer KDE apps are not the QML. And they don't quite follow exactly the Q style, which is again meant for QT widgets. So that's why KVanTum doesn't quite work one to one. So what do we have here? Let's actually give it a look. So we've got a menu, which is rather simple. We've got all the apps by category. We've got a couple of shortcuts to open up Dolphin in the home directory or the web browser in the KDE directory, KDE website, sorry. We've got a button to show all the files in your home folder and jump directly to them, which is rather useful. We've got all of the desktops and an app button to see all of the apps in all of the desktops. This basically replaces the task manager. You can also see the icons here. Then there is this empty space. We've got logout buttons. We've got the CPU. And then we've got the system tray. And as you can see, everything here is different. And it seems to be using the style of apps. It doesn't look like KDE Plasma at all. KDE Plasma is like transparent. This isn't. KDE apps aren't transparent. And in here, you just like manage the Wi-Fi connection. I just disconnected from Wi-Fi. It didn't mean to. Please activate again. Thank you. We've got Bluetooth here, which is, thank you, which is actually a window for some reason. We've got reminders and a calendar. And this calendar actually looks just like the one in Korganizer. So again, Korganizer is QT Widgets. So that makes sense to some extent. We've also got different background options in here. As an example, the configure wallpaper dialogue is completely different and exposes different options. There is much many less features compared to KDE Plasma. As an example, you can just use wallpapers like this. So, but I mean, you can set them depending on the virtual desktop. We can also add applets. And we've got three to choose from. So choose carefully. I'm going to go with weather. And in order to actually customize the size and position, it's not quite easy to do that, but it works. In KDE Plasma, it's implemented slightly better. But of course, it's came out. So I think it's slightly easier to actually implement it. It is well done though. That's something that has to be recognized. Yeah. Now you might be wondering, okay, so it is QT Widgets. What if I actually want to theme this? So using a custom QT Widgets style. So to do that, we open up system settings and we go into appearance application style. These are the Q styles. So if we switch to MS Windows 9, as an example, you can see that liquid actually immediately switches to that style as well. If we go to oxygen, then we've got oxygen. If we go to breeze, we've got breeze. So it actually follows the Q style. And that's pretty cool. Again, if you use Covantum, I haven't tested this, but it should work perfectly out of the box. If you do use Covantum, please try this out and let me know. It's actually super easy to start this up just to try it. I was using KDE Plasma until five minutes ago when I started recording and to switch to liquid, I just went to the terminal and typed kill all Plasma, liquid shell. And that was it. It just works out of the box. How nice is that? If you don't like this kind of theming though, liquid has got you covered because you do also have the option of styling through a CSS by using a style sheet.css file. You do have some examples out of the box in this file, which is included in the repository. And it helps you understand how to actually use this, which is useful. That said, of course, it doesn't quite support anything like moving the widgets within the panel. This is the panel and it cannot be edited in any way. So that's some limitation. If you want really a lot of customizations, this is not for you. And it lacks most of the cool feature that KDE Plasma got as used to because KDE Plasma has everything. But if for any reason you want a QT we just based shell or I don't know if KDE Plasma is broken and you need something quickly to pop up, then this actually works. I'm actually really impressed by how I was able to just use it out of the box. And that was everything. Though it's not really everything because there's still this animation because I'm doing this in my free time, this and all of my videos and my contributions to KDE. So in order to do this in my free time, I do need to eat or stuff like that. So if you want to donate something, that's helpful. And if I'm doing these videos, it's really thanks to the people who, the names who you just saw. So if you want to help me, you've got links. See you tomorrow though.