 A lot of Windows users are really excited about the upcoming release of Windows 11 because it has a more modern look and feel to it, right? It's got a better aesthetic to it. It really makes Windows a more attractive operating system compared to some of the competition because when you look at what macOS is doing, Chrome OS, and what of course the various GNU slash Linux distributions are doing, Windows is kind of lagging behind. It was starting to look a little old and dated. And now Windows 11 brings this fresh modern look. The problem is though it's a little late to the party because honestly the Windows 11 aesthetic that they revealed in their previews, Linux has been doing this for going on a decade. Now you've been able to pretty much get all of the effects and everything that Windows 11 is touting in Linux for many years. And one of the most popular Linux desktop environments is called KDE Plasma. It's a very customizable desktop environment. It has a lot of flexibility to it where you can make your desktop environment look and feel however it is you want it to look and feel like. So if you want it to mimic Windows 7, you can make it do that. If you want it to mimic Windows 11, you can make it do that. Of course you can have it mimic things like macOS or even Chrome OS. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but you have that option with KDE Plasma. And today I wanted to show you how you can make KDE Plasma mimic Windows 11. So this is the KDE Plasma desktop environment and it's a very beautiful desktop environment. A gorgeous wallpaper, it has a gorgeous theme, it has a very nice icon set. It is probably one of the most attractive, if not the most attractive desktop environments we have available on Linux. Now you can install KDE Plasma on any Linux distribution. It doesn't matter what Linux operating system you happen to be running, you could be running Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Arch Linux, Manjaro, Fedora, it doesn't matter. You can install KDE Plasma on any of them. For purposes of this video, this is a virtual machine that I had of Debian Unstable. So I installed KDE Plasma on top of Debian for this video. So let me go ahead and transform KDE Plasma into Windows 11. We're going to get that Windows 11 look and feel and the most important thing of course is going to be the wallpaper because when you don't have any programs open, all you see is a wallpaper. It takes up pretty much 100% of the screen. So let me go ahead and open up Firefox, which is the default browser in Debian and in most Linux distributions. And I'm going to go ahead and do a search for Windows 11 wallpaper download. And it should default to doing a Google search here in Firefox. And I'm going to go to the images tab here in Google. And the very first image here, I'm going to click on that. That is from wccftech.com. I guess they had the full sized dark image there. And that's the one I want because a lot of people choose the lighter image, you know, with the nearly white background. I want a darker wallpaper because honestly, I think Windows 11 did it wrong because Windows 11 has a very light panel and menu system and then they did that light wallpaper. That's too much light. You need some contrast. So I'm going to go ahead and grab the dark version of their wallpaper. I'm going to click on it and I'm going to save image as and I'm going to save it to my pictures directory here. I'm going to click save. And now that I've got that, I'm going to close out Firefox. It's going to warn me that I've got multiple tabs open. I'm going to tick that off so it never warns me about that again. And now what I want to do is I want to right click on the desktop and I want to configure desktop and wallpaper. And then what I want to do is I want to add an image and I want to go to my pictures directory and add that image. And now somewhere in this list of pictures, I should see the wallpaper. Yeah. And then I'm going to click apply. And just like that, we're already most of the way there, but just by changing a wallpaper. And you can see that by having the dark wallpaper against the light panel, that really is a nice contrast. That actually stands out. I don't know why the Microsoft guys chose the light wallpaper with the light panel. That aesthetically, that doesn't make as much sense. Now that we've got that squared away. I think we need to go and get an icon set. Now I love the icon set here in KDE Plasma. These blue icons, I actually think they're much more attractive than anything that you're going to get on Windows. But for purposes of this video, of course, we're going to go grab the Windows 11 icon set. So I'm going to do Windows 11 icon set Linux. And the very first link is the Windows 11 icon theme from the KDE Store, which is great because we're running the KDE Plasma desktop environment. And this icon set, that looks okay. I'm going to go ahead and click this download link here and click one of the TAR archives here and download. And that should download that into our downloads directory if we click save file here. And that should just take a second to download. And once the download is complete, I'm going to close Firefox again, and I'm going to open up our file browser here. This is the Dolphin file manager. And then I'm going to click into downloads, and there is that TAR. And I'm going to click on it, and it will open it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to extract it. And I'm just going to extract it right here in the directory it's already in. So there is the Windows 11 folder now. It's got two different icon sets, the standard Windows 11 and the Windows 11 dark icon set. The dark icon set, of course, would be used against a dark panel. That's why that's there. Now to use these two icon sets that are in this folder, the Windows 11 and the Windows 11 dash dark icon sets, we need to move them to a different directory. We need to move them to a directory at slash USR slash share slash icons. And you need sudo privileges to move them into that directory. So this would actually be easier to do in the terminal rather than in the file manager. So I'm going to open the menu system. And I'm going to start typing console with a K. That is KDE's terminal. And let's open that. I'm going to zoom in here so you guys can see the commands I type. The first thing you want to do is CD into the downloads directory. So just CD space and start typing downloads and then hit tab complete to fill out the whole path and hit enter. And then do a LS to list the contents of that directory. And you see the Win 11 directory. Let's CD into that directory as well. And I could do a LS into that directory. And you see that directory includes the two icon sets. Win 11 and Win 11 dash dark. So with sudo privileges do sudo space mv for move space and then Win 11 space. And then we want to move the Win 11 directory to slash user slash share slash icons slash then give it your sudo password. And we just move the Windows 11 icon set into that directory. I'm going to up arrow to run the same command except this time I want to move Win 11 dash dark into user share icons and hit enter. You don't have to enter the sudo password the second time since you had just entered it before. It remembers it for a few minutes. And now that we've moved those directories I'm going to close that out. You can see the directories were actually moved in the file manager as well. Close all of that out. Now let's open up the KDE Plasma System Settings. And I have an icon for it. If you wanted to you could search for it in the menu system with system and system settings. And this is your control panel. So think of it kind of like as the Windows control panel. And the very first selections of things you have to choose from are the appearance settings including a icons sub tab here. And you can see we now have a Windows 11 and a Windows 11 dark icon set to choose from these top three. Add way to breeze and breeze dark or defaults here in the KDE Plasma desktop. So I'm going to choose the Windows 11 and then I'm going to do apply. And now you see our icon set has changed. If I did the file manager once again, you can see instead of the big blue icon set that we had had before, we've got some different colors. These yellowish kinds of folders that are common in Windows. So those have changed. These were all blue icons before. So we've got the icon set. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to change this panel because one of the big things about the Windows 11 panel is that we're going to have a centered task bar and a centered start menu. So what I want to do is I want to right click on the panel and choose edit panel. And then what I want to do is I want to add a spacer. I'm going to click add spacer and you see it added a spacer to the end of the panel which is fine. And then I want to add a second spacer because I want to add a spacer at the beginning of the panel as well. And then that pretty much effectively centers everything. Then I'm going to close out the little edit mode here so that gets us out of being able to edit the panel. Now it's locked in place. I think a nice touch would be to change the start menu icon, the KDE logo here. If we could change that to a Microsoft Windows logo, that would be cool. So once again, I'm going to open up Firefox here. And in Firefox, I'm going to do a search for Windows 11 icon. Now let's just find a nice icon that we can use for this. So I'm going to once again click on the images tab. And let's see, here is a nice logo. It's got a transparent background and it's the right size, 256 by 256. That's a good icon size. I'm going to open image in new tab. Now that I've opened it in this new tab just to get a good look at it. Yeah, I like that. So I'm going to right click on it. I'm going to save image as, and I'm going to download that into the downloads directory, click save. And then I can close out Firefox now. And then what I want to do is want to right click on this. And then I want to configure the application launcher. And then you see a preview of the icon that it's using here, which is the standard KDE logo. I'm going to click on it. And then I want to choose a different icon. We have the system icons here, but I'm going to choose other icons. And I'm going to go search for something on the system. Of course, I want to search for the Windows 11 ping that we downloaded. And then I choose that, I click apply. And now we have a Windows logo where the KDE logo used to be. I don't know why people want to do that, but occasionally some people do. So there's how you do that. And I do think the panel actually is a little too big here. So what I would probably do is I would make this a little smaller. Once again, I'll click edit panel. And let's make that instead of 46 pixels tall. Let me do 44, 42, about 40. I think 40 is pretty good there. I think that's the right size for a panel. One of the things that is kind of new to Windows is virtual desktops. Virtual desktops, though, have been around on Linux for decades. Not even kidding, we've had virtual desktops for a long time. So I'm going to get back into the system settings. And let's configure a little bit of the virtual desktop. So you had the appearance settings here. Underneath it, you have workspace settings. And you have workspace behavior. And you could click on that. And then it's got some animation speed stuff. You can also choose whether you want to do single click to open files or double click. I'm a double click guy, so I actually would change that. But single click could be interesting for some people. But most Windows users are probably used to double clicking things. So that's probably a good thing to know where that setting is, because you may want to change it. Then I'm going to go into desktop effects. It's asking me, do I want to apply these settings before I leave this page? I actually do. And then let's get into desktop effects. Actually, let's get into virtual desktops. That's the one we want. By default, we only have desktop one. Let's add some desktops. I'm going to add four is a good number for virtual desktops, especially for full desktop environment. So I'm going to create desktop two. And then I'm going to edit and create desktop three. It doesn't really matter what you name these. You never really see the names of the desktops. I'm going to click apply. And now in our panel here, we have this desktop switcher that has four squares. And if you hover above it, it will give you the name desktop one, two, three. And if you have something open on that workspace, for example, I have this here opened, obviously, on desktop one. You can see desktop one has a window open on it. It shows you a little representation of a window being opened. If I open the Dolphin file manager once again, it will show you a representation of these two windows being open, kind of where they're at on the screen. So that's very cool. If I had something open on workspaces two, three, or four, you would see those. And you could very quickly switch to those workspaces. You can actually just use the mouse to switch. You can also use the keyboard to change virtual workspaces. So if you do Control and then F1 through 4, in my case, I can switch between the four different desktops. So if I did Control F4, I switched to desktop four. If I do Control F1, I switch back to the very first desktop. Some other cool things that you can do in Linux with virtual desktops is let me go back here. And in workspace behavior, I want to do desktop effects. And I'm gonna scroll down to workspace management. By default, you do have a desktop grid effect that's turned on. And if I do configure, let's look for the key binding, Control F8. What this does, it gives you a desktop grid view of all of your virtual desktops. So if I did Control F8, you see a four-paint grid here. And it will show you all the windows that are currently opened on these desktops. If I do Control F8 again, that goes away. Another effect that you can turn on is you can turn on the desktop cube. Let me click that on and hit Apply. And let me find the key binding for the cube. I believe it is Control F11, yeah. So now what happens if I do Control F11 instead of a grid, I get this cube. It's basically got four walls to it because I have four desktops and I can just spin it around. And when I find a desktop I want to be on, such as desktop four, I can double click it or I could hit Escape on the keyboard. Either one works and I'm on workspace four. I wanted to, I could Control F11 again and spin back around to desktop one and then just click on it and I'm back on desktop one. Another cool window management effect is the present windows effect. That's ticked on by default. If I click on the configure button to get the key bindings, there's three key bindings. Control F10, Control F9 and Control F7, they do different things. So Control F10 shows you all the windows that are available on all the desktops. So I'm gonna switch to a second workspace and let's open up the file manager. So I've got three different windows open on two different workspaces. If I did Control F10, it presents all of those windows right here in front of me so I could quickly navigate between them and choose one. Let's go back to the first workspace. You see Control F9 presents windows only on the current desktop. So Control F9 only shows me the two system settings windows. It doesn't show me the file manager open over on workspace two. Now Control F7 only shows you windows of the same window class. So right now I have two system settings windows open here. Let me open up a file manager as well on desktop one. And now what I wanna do is I'm gonna highlight one of the system settings windows here and I'm gonna do Control F7. It's only going to show me the two system settings windows. It didn't show me the file manager window. Now I could do Control F7 here on the file manager window and watch what happens. We get a present windows effect but it shows me just the two file manager windows and these are open on two different desktops. This is the one open on desktop one. This is the one open over on desktop two. So I could quickly switch over to the file manager that was opened on desktop two. I'm gonna go ahead and close that out and move back to desktop one. I'm gonna go ahead and close all of this out. One of the neat things people like to do on their windows desktop is to add cool little widgets such as date and time widgets and weather widgets and things like that to their desktop. You can do that here in KDE Plasma as well. I could right click on the desktop and I could use Add Widgets and you get a widget selection tool and there is a ton of built in KDE Plasma widgets that you could add. I'm gonna search for clock and the clock I wanna add I wanna add the digital clock. So I'm just gonna drag that over here and I'm gonna put this over on the right side of the screen and let me get out of that and let me enter edit mode and now I can drag this. What I could do is I could also resize it make it as big as I want it to be. I could add a background to it as well. I probably would wanna add a background to make that stand out. I wonder can I edit the font here? Let me configure digital clock. Let me see what kind of settings I have here. You have font style. What I'm gonna do is instead of using one of the standard system fonts, let's see. How about URW Gothic L? I don't know what that is, but yeah, that's a more modern sleek looking font. I would go with that I think. I'm gonna click OK. Now what I wanna do is I wanna add another widget. So instead of right clicking on the desktop since I'm still in edit mode here, I'm just gonna click the Add Widget button and now let me go ahead and add a weather widget because those are always fun and I'm just gonna drag this over here and click the Configure button because obviously we're not gonna get anything displayed until we tell it actually where we're at. Let's see, choose a location. Here we go. I'm gonna choose the NOAA. That's the National Weather Service here in the US. Location, I'm in Louisiana, but for purposes of this video, let's give Chicago as a location. It's gonna do a search. Let's choose this first one. I'm gonna select that. We'll tell it to update the weather every 30 minutes and click Apply and then go to Appearance. What do we want? Display, temperature, wind, pressure, humidity. Sure, why not? Units, let's make sure that that is in Fahrenheit. It is, since we're in the US, I guess it's smartly. Figured we wanted Fahrenheit temperatures. I'm gonna click OK on that and then what I'd like to do is actually get this sized similar to the clock. I think that would make a lot of sense. You can only make it so small though because it's displaying a ton of information. So let's resize the clock then to be about the same size and then we can get these into position where they're rather close and close out the widget selection tool. Yeah, I really like that. That is a very clean looking desktop, right? I think any Windows user, I think would be shocked at how amazingly gorgeous that KDE Plasma, this particular desktop environment can be on Linux. By the way, the blurring effect that the Windows 11 team was touting, blurred menus and backgrounds and things like that. You have the blurring of your menus and things in KDE Plasma as well. That's kind of a default setting these days in KDE. So I think it's really great that Windows 11 has adopted some of these really incredible features that have been available in Linux for years. But honestly, I don't know why you would want Windows 11 because it still lags behind. It's still light years behind what Linux is able to do. And to be honest, if you are thinking about upgrading to Windows 11 from Windows 10, you have to make sure that your machine can even run Windows 11 because Windows 11 is gonna have some very high system requirements that for Linux, Linux, even these very sleek, modern looking desktop environments that we have on Linux, most of these can run on machines that are five, six, eight years old. Even you don't need the latest and greatest hardware to run Linux. We're very conscious about this, right? We don't want people to have to buy new hardware to run Linux. That's not what we do in our community. We're very environmentally friendly in a lot of ways because we like to have these machines last years and years, sometimes more than a decade. We don't like people being forced into planned obsolescence where they buy a laptop. And three years later, they have to buy a new one because they can't even upgrade to the latest version of that operating system. That's not the way it works here. So if you guys are on Windows 10 or maybe some of you guys are still running Windows 7 even, I strongly urge you to consider trying out Linux. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Absi Gabe James, Mitchell Paul, Wes, Akami Allen, Chuck Kurt, David, Dylan, Gregory, Haiko, Erion, Alexander, Pease, Archon, Fedora, Polytech, Raver, Rit, Prophet, Scott, Steven and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. There's ever growing list of names on the screen you're seeing. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you guys appreciate my work and want to consider supporting me, check out DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. KDE is better at Windows 11 than Windows 11.