How to install Kde Plasma 5 on Arch Linux

In the last two post I’ve talked about the new Kde Plasma 5. In particular I’ve posted some pictures about Plasma 5 on my Arch Linux workstation and, after a not too long testing period, I’ve also wrote a review about its current status.
Since some readers have asked to me how to install it on their Arch Linux workstations I’ll going to write a small tutorial to explain how to do this.

Since it’s needed to remove the entire Kde 4 workstation before installing it, I thought it was a wise choose working outside the graphical environment switching to text mode (Ctrl + Alt + F1).
After doing this, I’ve installed Plasma 5 in the following way:

Since Plasma 4 and Plasma 5 can’t run together I had to remove the kdebase-workspace:

# pacman -Rc kdebase-workspace

Then I’ve installed Plasma 5 with the following command:

# pacman -S plasma

Plasma 5 recommends sddm as display manager so we need to install it using the following commands:

# pacman -S sddm
# systemctl enable sddm
# systemctl start sddm

Sddm offers some customization features. We can customize it graphically installing a kcm module:

# pacman -S sddm-kcm

The module is accessible via System Setting > Startup and Shutdown > Login Screen.

For fixing some graphical incongruences between Qt5 and Qt4 apps, I suggest to install the Breeze theme for Kde 4 and set it correctly using the qtconfig tool:

# pacman -S breeze-kde4

Reboot your machine and enjoy your Plasma 5 desktop environment!