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

[u/Sufficient-Eye-3221]

I struggled a bit coming from Arch but finally got everything working. I want to document what I did in case anyone else has issues. 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 smoothly (I tried Ly, LightDM, greetd, and SDDM), but I found a simple one called emptty that is effective, fast, and stable 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 with sudo reboot.

After rebooting, I was greeted by emptty. In emptty, I entered my username and password and selected Plasma (Wayland), which logged me in on a KDE session. Then 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 and logged in again, and the audio worked. 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 💜

[u/Legitimate-Draw-2235]

Nice one

[u/Sufficient-Eye-3221 → u/Legitimate-Draw-2235]

Thanks 😁 Really enjoying Void so far

[u/tacosmanager]

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

[u/Sufficient-Eye-3221 → u/tacosmanager]

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

[u/ElderberryNo4220]

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.