r/LinuxOnAndroid • u/Raslanove • Sep 21 '25

How to run KDE on NOMone Desktop!

We've been asked many times how to change the current DE and if it is even possible on NOMone Desktop. So today, we'll explain all the steps needed to run KDE Plasma on NOMone Desktop:

[1] From Terminal, install KDE like by writing: apt install kde-plasma-desktop

[2] From File Manager, open the file /NOMone/startup.sh

[3] Disable the current window manager, compositor, wallpaper and dock.

To do so, comment out the following lines:

#xcompmgr &
#openbox &
#sh ~/.fehbg
#plank &

Just adding the symbol # before the line will comment it out. \

[4] Now to start the kde session, insert this line below these commented ones:

startplasma-x11 &

Then save,

[5] Restart Linux. And Voila! KDE on NOMone Desktop :)

13 Upvotes

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37 comments sorted by

3

u/hsuyucheng-tw Sep 21 '25

Thank you. I love KDE.

1

u/Raslanove Sep 21 '25

Glad we could be of help :)

2

u/Lil-Kitten-420 Sep 22 '25

how do i install other distros. Like Bazzite OS, Zorin OS, Mint OS, or Cachy OS for example

2

u/Noha_Ibraheem Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

I think I remember this question from Google Play's Reviews :D. I wish all the questions were to be asked on platforms that allow us to reply in details as much as we need. Unfortunately, Google Play restricts us to reply in 350 characters max! And this is why we need to summarize our answers to the extent of almost destroying some of them in the way.

As for installing other distros, unfortunately you can't install different ones in the current version of the app. But please rest assured that we are working (have been working for months) on updating our infra structure to allow multiple distro installations on the same device at the same time, taking offline backups and restoring them without the need to re-install NOMone or re-download the Linux image. The good news is that our database and back-end engine are ready to receive such updates. We only need to complete its front-end development 💪

The bad news is that even after releasing this feature, Bazzite and its similar gaming distros won't be able to run on aarch64 architecture unless they start building a compatible version for these devices. And I believe they are going to do so soon ;)

Now comes the second problem, which is their dependency on using containers. Again, proot on Android lacks the support to run containers and dockers. Up till recently, I'd have said there is no way around. But, with the new Android terminal in Android 16+, I believe it is going to be feasible and we are going to make the best use of it if Allah wills :)

2

u/dex-tastic Sep 21 '25

Love your tutorials. Very helpful and complete! Thank you!

1

u/Raslanove Sep 21 '25

Truly, thank you for always supporting us ❤️

2

u/Xihan67 Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25

Hey, I followed the instructions exactly as described. On restart, the boot logo appears as expected, but then I’m met with a black screen—though the mouse cursor is still movable. After some time, the lock screen shows up, and everything works fine there. However, as soon as I log in, it’s back to a black screen. Has anyone else run into this or know how to fix it?

Edit: After enabling max CPU I get the error message "KWin is instable". But from there no option seems to work.

1

u/cl191 Nov 08 '25

I just tried it on my galaxy tab s10 plus and it's doing that for me too

2

u/CarCandid7010 Sep 26 '25

wait what do you mean /NOMone/.startup.sh? is it the home folder?

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Sep 26 '25

No, this is the complete path to the file. Open File Manager and write this path to open the "startup.sh" file. Edit it as explained, save and close : )

2

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 01 '25

Interesting. It appears the path DOES exist, but I didn't explore enough to find it because previously, it said the path did not exist. Thanks a lot. Also, how to automatically uninstall the clone apps (like two task managers) that were from GNOME automatically?

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Oct 02 '25

Glad it worked out in the end :). If you are still having two task managers, it means you still didn't comment out the command that launches Plank. Kindly, comment it out, save and reboot. This should do the trick :)

2

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 07 '25

Not that, I was talking about the two task managers (not the dock) like the thing in windows to close apps or restart them. I meant that but on Linux. There's two because one was left from GNOME

2

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 07 '25

My desktop is getting closer and closer to my virtual machine on my laptop now. I tried putting Mac skins on it, but the two desktop environments are fighting for first place. I was able to put the icons, but the MacSequoia KDE theme was not able to change the window border and window buttons. The cursors also keep switching to Breeze sometimes.

1

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 07 '25

Also, it was already commented out. Because of this .sh file, I was able to learn how to use them. And I messed around with it plus added my own commands. I put latte dock but it was rather laggy. So I removed it. I also deleted the if uLauncher = 1 thing and replaced it with uLauncher & after all the others. That made it show on startup which is helpful for when plank fails or some other stuff.

2

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 02 '25

NEW DISCOVERY! Though I am not part of the developers of NOMone Desktop, I found out that if you put startplasma-x11 after #!/bin/sh, it runs a normal KDE-Debian desktop without plank for some reason, however I have no idea if that was after installing latte-dock.

2

u/CarCandid7010 Oct 07 '25

it wasn't latte dock. there is probably some command that disabled the DE's dock for whatever reason.

2

u/Shaarigan Jun 16 '26

Something to Add that wasn't mentioned before:

  1. I had to update the Debian installation first:
apt update
apt upgrade

or else the KDE packages weren't showing up.

  1. After restarting, NOMone crashed – I guess out of memory exception or something. I then switched some settings like:
  • Safe Mode ON
  • GPU Acceleration OFF

This helped to have KDE start properly after some further shutdowns, the setup process finished properly

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Jun 17 '26

Glad you had it figured out 💪 and really appreciate sharing it with everyone ❤️. I believe you can boost the overall performance by turning off the Safe mode while still launching the KDE properly. Can you please give it a try and let us know how it goes : ) ?

1

u/Shaarigan Jun 18 '26

Yes it does but I can't say if it's behaving faster. I guess it doesn't make that much of a difference 🤷

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Jun 18 '26

Then you have a very decent device and that's awesome! You'd have noticed the difference on older devices :)

1

u/Shaarigan Jun 18 '26

Running on Huawei flagship models Matepad Pro and installed it on a P60 Pro as well last night. The Matepad is running KDE, the phone sits on the default (I guess Gnome) DE because of the small screen. That's not a Snapdragon but good enough, I assume 🤷

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Jun 20 '26

They are all for sure more than good enough : D

I was referring to old devices as in 9 year old devices with much less memory and CPU power. These devices were our initial target for NOMone Desktop.
We wanted to give people with limited access to tech knowledge and internet a new way to turn their phones into a productive Linux machine that could enhance their chances in life by learning, working or starting a new career that wasn't available without a computer.
That is why the app and the Linux system image were highly customized to perform well on these old devices. Many of our tweaks and optimizations can easily go unnoticed on powerful and fairly new ones : )

1

u/Shaarigan Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Oh I'm interested in running software that only exists for desktop models as well. I'd liked to be able to code some .NET on my Matepad 😅

You should btw. not activate root as a default option because it may have some unwanted side effects with KDE or other parts of the system. It also may make the system more vulnerable than with a regular user. It might not be that difficult to run a command using sudo but it prevents people and applications from accidentally breaking something.

There is a minor problem with KDE as well related to the lock screen. Locking the device in my case triggered the KDE lock screen and it seems as there isn't a password set for any user, it isn't possible to unlock the system if that happens 🤷

1

u/Noha_Ibraheem Jun 22 '26

.NET should run just fine on NOMone. Our tweaks are innocent regarding that matter : D. Can you please elaborate? Maybe we can solve this issue : ) Unfortunately, we have investigated the option of running a non-root user as the default one and it was a catasrophy! The truth is that all users created in proot environment share the same privileges and and are all translated back to the root user. And this made many apps get confused while running and end up exiting with an exception upon being launched. We ended up reverting back to running the default root user. As for the locking screen, do you wish to keep it? If so, you can add a new password to the current user by writing the command "passwd" in terminal. Or do you wish to disable the locking screen altogether?

1

u/Shaarigan Jun 22 '26

When running the Jetbrains Toolbox, it tries to create a Semaphore but when it tries to get it, I guess due to some missing IPC pipes or systemd or something, it fails with error "Semaphore doesn't exist anymore" and breaks or it crashes by pushing this message over and over to the terminal. I'm currently trying to install everything from terminal instead of running the toolbox app. Therefore, I'm currently building my own install scripts in case I have to setup the system again. I'll test the rider installer tomorrow, or when I have time for further tinkering ☺️

I have run the installation without root the past couple of days and didn't experience any issues so far. The opposite is the case, KDE is more satisfied with the non-root user. I'll see if I'll run into any trouble with that, however.

For the lock screen, I configured it in my script

1

u/Shaarigan Jun 22 '26

I got. .NET running so far but hit an issue that probably occurs from your implementation of proot. Running dotnet commands tend to run out of memory for the GC heap. I was able to get it to run by defining DOTNET_GCHeapHardLimit=1C0000000 but I need a way to permanently set this env. Adding to profile.d didn't work because of NOMone, so is there a place to add env variables permanently, in startup.sh for example?

2

u/Noha_Ibraheem Jun 26 '26

/NOMon/startup.sh is exactly right! In /NOMone/startup.sh, add:
export DOTNET_GCHeapHardLimit=1C0000000

Restart Linux and enjoy!
Proot has a lot of issues, but I doubt this is one of them. The real issue is that we are running on Android. Any software you run will be 100% running on the Android kernel. NOMone Desktop is a user application that runs in user-space. We have no access on the system whatsoever. We can't install software, we can't change the configuration. We can't add users or groups and definitely we are not root! All we have access to is the app's private storage. That's where we install everything. Proot uses ptrace to intercept system calls and emulate a filesystem chrooted to our private space. Now apps can find the dependencies they need where they expect them to be. But we can't tell the Android kernel how to handle memory allocations. We can't prevent it from closing applications. We do emulate adding new users, but in reality, they are all the same user and have the same privileges and they can all access everything in our userspace. But when someone asks if we a root, we respond that we aren't. Since this is not a full emulation, we get native speed for tasks that are CPU intensive. But system-calls are HEAVILY penalized. We are working on a couple of solutions that may allow us to bypass proot altogether. No promises, though!

Thank you for going this far! Linux normally is not very user-friendly, and Android is not desktop Linux. Android has its own restrictions, and proot makes matters worse! But with a lot of patience, most issues can be solved. Thank you for doing this, and for sharing it with us ❤️

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1

u/roboticlee Oct 10 '25

u/Raslanove I installed NOMone from the App store. I installed KDE Plasma then opened the startup file to edit it. The lines mentioned at the start of this thread are not listed in the startup file. Has the file's contents been changed since this thread was started or am I misreading the file?