 Today, we're going to be going from Noob to PowerUser using Manjaro KDE. I've done three of these in the past. I did a video from Noob to PowerUser with Linux Mint Cinnamon, I did one with Ubuntu, their GNOME edition, and I did one with MX Linux, which uses the XFCE desktop. Today, I'm going to be doing this with Manjaro's KDE edition, and the way these typically work, basically, I just take these standard Linux distributions with their big desktop environments, and you guys know I'm not a desktop environment user, I'm not a KDE user, for example. So what I typically do on these videos is I just show you some configurations, some tweaks, some changes that I would immediately make if I were using this particular distribution with this particular desktop environment. So I created a virtual machine here of Manjaro KDE, and the very first thing I personally would immediately change is some of the key bindings. So if I search for shortcuts, I believe, yeah. So you have two different shortcuts, you have shortcuts and custom shortcuts. I'm going to choose shortcuts first, this is some of the built-in ones, because some of the most important ones I need to immediately change. KRunner, which is our run launcher, by default it is set to alt space. That's kind of our run launcher prompt, and I'm going to use that all the time. I'm probably going to launch all of my programs by just typing name of command in KRunner rather than using the traditional menu down here, right? It would just be easier for me. So I don't like that key binding, alt plus space, it's okay, it's not horrible. You have a couple of alternate key bindings that would also launch KRunner. You have alt plus F2, which is not a good key binding because it involves a function key, which many smaller keyboards are not going to have function keys, at least not on their top layer. That's a complicated key binding for some keyboards. Also the search button is also available if you want to launch KRunner using the search button on your keyboard. But most keyboards are not going to have a search button as well. So I'm going to change this to something a lot more standard. So for me, I'm going to add a custom shortcut. And for me, I use super shift enter in all of my tiling window manager configs. Typically what I use to launch a D menu or a Rofi. So that's what I'm going to use here. And now that I have that set, I'm going to hit apply. And now super shift enter will always bring up KRunner. And I can escape to get out of it if I don't want to enter a command. And for me, because I'm never going to use the default shortcuts, I'm just going to go ahead and tick them off just in case I want to use some of these key bindings later in a different command. But typically for window manager kind of stuff, you want all of your key bindings typically to involve the super key plus some other keys. I don't like key bindings that involve the alt key. I don't like key bindings that involve the control key because alt and control, those sometimes have key bindings and applications themselves. Many applications have built in key bindings inside the application that involve the alt key or the control key. For example, if I was running Emacs, there's a million key bindings inside Emacs that involve control and or the alt key. So having your window manager also have key bindings that involve control and alt. That's a bad idea. The super key is not used anywhere. That's why typically most people that run standalone window managers are always using the super key as their modifier key because it will not conflict anywhere else. Well, you could have conflicts if you use alt or control in your key bindings. So that's one of the most important key bindings. I have to change right away. There's two others. There's really three key bindings. I have to have right away just to be able to function the way I want to function. The first is having the run launcher set to super shift enter and then closing the window with focus by default. That is set for alt plus F4. That's a horrible key binding once again because it involves a function key. Smaller form factor keyboards won't have function keys or they'll have function keys, but they'll be on lower levels of the keyboard. They're really complicated to hit. So that's a bad key binding. So let's make this super shift C for close. That's a standard tiling window manager key binding. Super shift C is the standard key binding to close windows and Xmonen. I believe it's also the same default key binding in DWM. So we're just going to use that everywhere. So I'm going to tick off using alt F4. I'm never going to use that key binding. I'm going to hit apply and now if I do super shift C, will it actually close the window? It does not. Even though I have that set, I wonder if that is also set somewhere else. Let me open a different window like the terminal window, super shift C. So I guess it hasn't taken effect in this window that I already had open, but super shift C is working. And then finally, I need to be able to launch a terminal using some easy key binding. Do they have control alt T set in Manjaro? No, they don't. Super T, maybe alt T. Alt T does something weird there. But what I want to do is let's launch the terminal. Let's see. Terminal, if I search for it, know how about console is KDE's terminal emulator. That does not look like that is set anywhere. And that might be one I have to go and add in the custom keyboard shortcut. So there is custom shortcuts there. So let's go ahead and try to add a custom key binding. So I do edit, let's see, new global shortcut command URL. Let's see if this will work. So new action, the action will be console that will launch the terminal. And the trigger, which is the shortcut, will be input and will be super enter. And let me hit apply and now super enter launches console and super shift C closes the window with focus. And remember, super shift enter will launch Krunner if I wanted to launch console this way and super shift C will close it. Now that I have those three key bindings, that will really speed up navigation because never again will I ever close a window using the mouse, right? If I want to close the window any window with focus super shift C is so much quicker and easier on the hands and the wrist than ever navigating with the mouse to close a window again. And now I'm also never going to navigate with the mouse to go to a menu system and navigate through a menu system. Sometimes you will need to do that for discovery purposes if you're not sure what's installed on your system. But for me, typically 99% of the time, I know exactly the program I want to launch. So I'm just going to do super shift enter and, you know, Firefox, for example, and I'm just going to hit enter and take a second for Firefox to launch because the web browser, you know, it's a kind of heavy program, I go to help about Firefox. Let's see, we're on the latest Firefox 112.0. I did not update the system. That is something I should have done. But I did a fresh install. I doubt there are any updates. Let's do a quick Pacman dash capital S lowercase y, lowercase u. So there is nothing to do. Now, one thing for noob to power users on any arch-based system is you want to make sure that parallel downloads are set up. It will drastically speed up your updates and your software installations. So Manjaro, I don't believe has parallel downloads enabled by default. So what you want to do is you want to sudo and then name of text editor, I would use Vim. If you're not comfortable with Vim and you may not be, you could use something like Kate, which is standard plain text editor in the KDE test-top environment and slash etsy slash pacman.com. And it says running Kate can cause bugs and expose you to security vulnerabilities. So I guess it doesn't like us doing that with Kate. Well, we'll do it with Nano. Nano is installed. Now I'm not that familiar with Nano, but what you want to do is you want to go down the pacman.com and look for this line parallel downloads. Now by default it has the pound symbol or the hashtag, you know, it's got that in front of the line. That means that line is ignored. It's commented out. So delete that pound sign. And now you see parallel downloads equals five. That means it can download up to five packages at a time now pacman can. So control X and then Y for yes to actually write that file and save it. And now when you do any kind of software installations or software updates, whether at the command line here in the terminal with pacman or through your graphical package manager, hopefully that process is speeded up a little bit. One thing I wouldn't mind doing is adding some basic tiling window manager functionality to KDE Plasma. And there is a plugin. If I hit super enter to bring up the terminal, let me zoom in. There is a plugin that we can install called K-Win-Bismuth K-Win, it's KDE's window manager. Bismuth is the name of the tiling window manager plugin. There's several Bismuth packages in the AUR. I'm going to install K-Win-Bismuth-Bin. It's a binary package. There is no way to install AUR packages though on Manjaro out of the box because they don't have a AUR helper like Yay or Paru installed. That's why the commands when I started typing them are red. Those programs don't exist on the system. But you can install Yay very easily on Manjaro because they have it packaged in their standard repos. So simply do a sudo pacman-s Yay-capital-s Yay and Yay installed and then do a Yay-capital-s K-Win-Bismuth-Bin to install the Bismuth tiling plugin from the AUR. I'm going to hit enter a couple of times. Finally it's going to ask me to proceed with the installation. Hit enter one more time. K-Win-Bismuth is installed. Now if I do super shift C to close that window, super shift enter to get to K-Runner and start looking for settings again. And now go to window management. Under window management we have window tiling and now we can enable window tiling. So now when I do super enter, super enter, well it's just going to make those full screen of me. Super shift C to close those. I thought it would tile them. I wonder if I open something else like the dolphin file manager. Yeah, let me open a second instance of dolphin. So right click, let's see. Open new window. That's still not tiling them. Even though I enabled tiling, let me go in here, enabled tiling. I haven't hit apply yet. That's my fault. Now that I hit apply, yeah now super enter. Yeah, now you can see they're tiled side by side. Super enter again for another terminal, super shift C to close, super shift C to close. All right. And of course I could go in here and change a lot of the window rules. Actually, there's no window rules set up, but I could add new window rules, K-Win scripts. Let's see what that is now. I just want to go into the tiling and appearance. Probably what I want to do is go into shortcuts. So shortcuts. We have window tiling shortcuts. Okay. And if I wanted to, I could play with some of these functions. I'm not going to do that right now though. I do have basic tiling functionality enabled. I have some really powerful keyboard shortcuts set up to really limit me needing to ever really use the mouse. I shouldn't use the mouse ever for launching programs because now super shift enter just gets me the K-Runner. I can just start typing super shift C, closes all the windows. Think about how many hundreds of times a day you close a window, right? And you're always having to reach for the mouse to do that. Never again. Think of how much that's going to save you from that repetitive stress of constantly grabbing the mouse to close a window. Now that we just set up those easy key bindings. Now let's play around a little bit with some theming options. I love the way Plasma looks out of the box. I love the default themes, Breeze and BreezeDark, I like the icon set. Manjaro's got these nice green icons that kind of match the Manjaro branding. Manjaro always has fantastic wallpapers as well. So it really looks good out of the box, but I wouldn't mind having some other theming options. So I'm going to do yay dash s, I'm going to do sweet dash KDE dash, I believe it. Is it full? I think I've got to actually think about this package. I don't install this package very often. It is sweet dash theme dash full dash get. And then I'm also going to install some candy icons dash get. Let's just go with those two packages for now. We may install some other stuff as well. But let's see how we like these. And it finished installing those two packages. So I'm going to super shift C to close that window and super shift enter to get back into Krunner. I remember as we were in settings before, so I don't even have to type it. I like that about Krunner defaulting to that last command that we ran. That is actually really, really nice. So now I'm going to go into appearance. And let's see. Yeah, we have sweet as an option. So let's hit apply on that. And I like that. I like dark themes. And by default, it also switched over to the candy icon set because I guess that's the default icon set associated with that particular theme. So if I super shift C, let me open the file manager here and you can see that it's really nice. Of course, those of you that are familiar with Geruda, you guys are familiar with sweet and with candy icons. So that is a really sharp theme. If you like that sort of thing, I know it's not for everybody. It's a little garish and jarring sometimes with that color overload, right? It's a color explosion. But for me, you know what? I'm just going to go with that for now. Now for me, because I spend so much time in the terminal, one of the biggest things to theme for me is the terminal. So I'm going to super enter to get back into this terminal here. And I'm going to go ahead and install some stuff for the terminal. I'm going to yay dash capital S, neo fetch in case we want to do neo fetch. I also want to download my shell dash color dash scripts, which can be found in the you are that's my own package there, you guys, you often see me on camera opening terminals. You get this random shell terminal color scheme thing that comes up and various ASCII art. That is my shell color scripts package that can be found on the you are I'm also going to go ahead and install lol cat because we may want to play with that for some coloring as well. I also want to install ex a, which is an alternative to the standard LS command that people enter into the terminal. So let's install those and it finished installing those packages. And now if I run a neo fetch, that is neo fetch, neo fetch, it's kind of nice to give you some system information. Now for me, you know, because I'm always opening terminals, I like each terminal to be different from the next and that's why I like my color scripts package. So if I run the command color script space random, I get a random color script every time I run that. If I wanted this in my bash RC or my ZSH RC, so that every time I open a terminal, it automatically runs a random color script. Well, why don't we do an LS LS dash LA and we have the bash RC and the ZSH RC here. I believe by default they're using ZSH as the user's shell. So let's open, I'll use nano again. So let's open the dot ZSH RC file with nano and I'm going to scroll down here to the end and at the end, all I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and do the command I entered at the command line earlier, color script space random, put that at the end of your ZSH RC or at the end of your bash RC if you're using bash or add it to both files that way you've got it in both shells if you want. Now control X to save Y for yes. And now let me super shift C to close that terminal. Now let me super enter to open the terminal, random color script. There's another terminal. There's another terminal. Now I know a lot of people would probably just prefer the same thing in their terminals. But again, because I'm always in multiple terminals for me to help keep things straight. What terminal is what? I like having different art on each terminal. Again, it just helps me. It also helps you guys visually for me having that going on as well. And if you wanted to get more creative, I mean, let me super enter. What you could do is you could pass Neo Fetch into LOL cat so I could pipe it into LOL cat. Let me zoom in so you can see that command. And you get Neo Fetch run through LOL cat, which is this gradient of colors. I could do the same thing with color script random, pipe it into LOL cat and I get a random color script, but it looks like LOL cat does not run with that. It did work in that particular script though. That is definitely not the colors for the Haskell logo is what that is. Yeah, that one. So some of the color scripts will work with LOL cat. Some of them it looks like their default colors overwrite or you just take precedent over LOL cat. I really like that one though. If you like LOL cat and probably if you're going to use the sweet plasma theme and the candy icons, which have this almost LOL cat gradient color, you're probably also going to love LOL cat as far as some of your terminal artwork. Now there was one other thing we installed other than the shell color scripts, Neo Fetch and LOL cat. We also did EXA, which is an alternative to the LS command. It has some colorful options. What I want to do is I want to go ahead and nano back into the ZSHRC and let's add an alias. Let's create some space. I'm going to do alias LS equals. So the LS command will no longer be the standard LS command. I want it to be EXA and I'm going to give it these flags dash AL space dash dash color equals ALWAYS dash dash group dash directories dash first. And then the closing single quote there. And if I did that right, ctrl X Y to save. And now let's source the ZSHRC file. That saves me from just closing the terminal and reopening it to get the new ZSHRC. You can just source the config right away. And now LS is the EXA command, the EXA command with all those flags and options I give it because that's typically how I want my LS command to look every time. I want all the information, right? I want all the files, hidden files included. I want the directories first before the files and also want to know the file permissions because I'm always wondering about file permissions, especially if things are executable or not. So that is my LS command, supershift C to close. Now let's talk about wallpapers. ChangeRO has a nice collection of wallpapers, but you may want some other wallpapers. I mean that's part of arising your desktop as part of the theming process, right? Well let's yay dash capital S variety, which is a wallpaper changer that can download wallpapers and you can set it to at regular intervals change the wallpaper for you. So let's go ahead and install that now supershift C to close and then supershift enter and let's run variety wallpaper changer. It's welcome to variety and you just walk through everything here use internet access yes, but can download wallpapers from the internet from various places that you give it permission including things like Flickr and Unsplash and Bing and wherever and you can actually set this up to change wallpaper in this case by default every five minutes or so. And if you go to the downloading tab you can change the location of the folder where it downloads the wallpapers to if it's fetching wallpapers from the internet if you gave it permissions to do such a thing. If I do supershift C it'll close that window variety though is not closed because it's always changing your wallpapers it's always running in the background and you have a little icon down here in the sys tray that you can quickly open if you need to do something. For those of you that want a quick and easy way just to download a whole bunch of nice wallpapers I'm going to super enter open the terminal again what you could do is you could get clone https colon slash slash gitlab.com slash dwt1 that's my gitlab and I have a repository called wallpapers. Get cloned at wallpapers repository it's going to take a minute because images are big and there's about 300, 310 or so wallpapers in that by doing ls you will see now you have a wallpapers directory here in your home directory cd into wallpapers and do an ls and yeah 310 jpegs the image format they're just all numbered sequentially. So there are 300 wallpapers so if I right click on the desktop and I do configure desktop and wallpaper let's see add an image let's say I can add image and go into the home directory I can go into wallpapers and wonder could I just use them all yeah let's just add all 300 now this is probably really going to slow down the settings manager here having that many wallpapers can I make this full screen yeah but you can see the wallpapers that you got from my gitlab there and you can just choose any of them some of the ones that might look pretty nice with our sweet theme and the candy icons let's have something with some purples and blues something that's kind of got some a nice splash of color to it how about that one right there number 217 I'm going to hit OK that might work yeah see how that would well it didn't mean to open the terminal I meant to open the file manager yeah I think that's not bad I think that wallpaper would work with that theme we got some some nice little blurring going on there in the menu system there in plasma now I know a lot of people don't like installing software from the command line just using pacman and of course manjaro has a fantastic graphical application for installing software called hammock and his hammock installed I don't know when you see variety just changed the wallpaper so variety remember the default setting is to change every five minutes so if I do software is there not learn there's add remove software let's see what that launches that launches hammock okay says the system is up to date there is all the installed packages I hit the little hamburger menu go to about this is hammock 10.5-02 now for me I don't really care for graphical software centers or at least I don't care for this style of graphical software center with all the images and you know it's got a lot of it looks like a cell phone app store right a mobile phone app store but it's kind of slow it's kind of clunky these kinds of software centers typically I want speed I want to be able to to quickly look up the program I'm looking for install it boom away I go and this is a little much for me I actually prefer a different GUI package manager that is available on ArchBase system so I'm gonna super enter to get into the terminal again and I'm gonna yay dash capital S octopi if I can spell it correctly and let's go ahead and install this let me super shift C to close the terminal now let me super shift enter and run octopi octopi there it is and this is a little cleaner for me because it reminds me a lot of Debian's synaptic package managers the same kind of format it's a GUI tool right but there's no icons and no screenshots and all of that mess it just lists all the packages in the repository you could quickly do a search for a package for example htop which is already installed but you know you search for something and then take it on or off and then hit the little checkbox and away you go to install the program and it's a pretty simple little software center and for me I find this just a really fantastic software center that I honestly doesn't get enough love you don't hear about octopi that much people talk about PAMAC all the time on ArchBase systems but octopi is really nice one cool thing about octopi is it can display packages from the AUR if you install the AUR helper it doesn't matter which one you installed but for us we installed yay so if I go into tools into options there's a AUR tab you can pick from various AUR helpers if you have multiple ones installed or you can choose do not use the AUR but for us it defaults to yay we already had yay installed so it's going to use the yay helper so if you want to search for something in the AUR like my DM scripts package I start searching for it nothing is returned because it's just searching standard manjaro repos but you see the little alien icon here if I hover over it says use the yay tool so click it and now it's going to search using yay meaning yay is going to search the AUR and it's going to find my DM scripts dash get package that we could then install so octopi really cool works on the standard repos works on the AUR and it's quick fast it's very intuitive and I love it for a package manager and you can see we keep getting new wallpaper every five minutes now changing every five minutes for me is a little quick but I don't know for some people you might like that so that's just some of the changes I would immediately make if I were installing manjaro KDE and I was going to live in it that's some of the things I would immediately do just change some of the key binding some of the theming options of course I've got to have my wallpapers I got to have my eye candy so I hope you guys enjoyed from noob to power user with manjaro KDE this is a like I said about the fourth time I've done this I know you guys like these kinds of videos I don't do them that often I probably do these you know once or twice a year if you want to see more of these kinds of videos let me know which distribution and desktop environment I should do for the next one in this series and before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode gave James Maxim the homies to bald Matt mimic Mitchell Paul Royal West armored dragon bash potato Chuck commander angry George Lee Mars drum met those Nate early on Paul peace harsh and Vador polytech realities for less red profit Roland was definitely Williams and a bit they're my high steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode from noob to power user on manjaro KDE it would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and Fred open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace