KDE/liquidshell

Author: Martin Koller, kollix@aon.at
First release: Oktober 2017

liquidshell is an alternative to plasmashell

It does not use QtQuick but instead uses QtWidgets.

Main Features:
- Wallpaper per virtual desktop
- No animations, no CPU hogging, low Memory footprint
- Instant startup
- No use of activities (I never used nor needed them)
- QtWidgets based, therefore follows widget style from systemsettings
- Icons are used from your globally defined icon theme from systemsettings
- Colors are used from your globally defined color theme from systemsettings
- Can additionally be styled with css by passing the commandline option -stylesheet filename.css
  (see included example stylesheet.css)
- uses existing KDE Frameworks dialogs for most configurations, e.g. StartMenu, Virtual Desktops, Bluetooth, Network
- Just one bottom DesktopPanel, containing:
  StartMenu (allowing drag of entries into konqueror/dolphin to configure QuickLaunch or AppMenu entries)
  QuickLaunch (showing icons for .desktop files from a configurable folder)
  AppMenu (showing .desktop files in a menu from a configurable folder, defaults to users desktop folder)
  Pager (for switching virtual desktops)
  WindowList (Popup showing all open windows on all desktops)
  TaskBar (showing windows on the current desktop, allowing drag of an entry onto the Pager to move to a different desktop)
  LockLogout
  SysLoad widget including CPU, Memory, Swap and Network bars, live updated tooltip
  SysTray with integrated Network-, Notifications-, Device Notifier-, Bluetooth-, Battery- display.
      It also features PackageKit software updates integration.
      The DeviceList also shows devices connected and paired with KDEConnect.
      Display of StatusNotifier items from other applications (no legacy embedded icons yet).
      Notifications kept in a history list for some minutes, including timestamp and text selectable per mouse
      (very handy for copy/paste of TAC numbers from online banking received via SMS and transferred to KDE
       via kdeconnect)
  Clock widget (with calendar popup, tooltip for selected cities)

The main motivation was to have a reliable desktop shell which does not hog the CPU or RAM.
It should be slick and have just the features I need in my daily
work. No need having all the bells and whistles anyone can think of.
Just have a plain, solid, fast workhorse.

How to start liquidshell instead of plasmashell
-----------------------------------------------

just copy liquidshell.desktop into your ~/.config/autostart/ folder

To avoid the start of plasmashell, create a file
~/.config/autostart/plasmashell.desktop

(or ~/.config/autostart/org.kde.plasmashell.desktop - depending on what's the name in
/etc/xdg/autostart/ as it seems this was changed recently)

with the following 2 lines as content:
[Desktop Entry]
Hidden=true


Building from source
--------------------

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make