Chapter 2. Using Plasma

Plasma™ Components

Plasma™ Widgets and Containments

The essence of Plasma™ revolves around two basic concepts:

Plasma™ Widgets

Applets, or small applications that live on the desktop.

Containments

Applets that act as the container for the Plasma™ widgets

On a default desktop, there are two main elements: the Panel and the Desktop itself. Both are containments in the Plasma™ sense.

Default Plasma™ Desktop

Note

The Plasma™ Desktop can be configured in countless ways. The screenshot seen below shows a fairly standard desktop. Some distributions apply extensive customizations, so your desktop may look different.

Similarly, the graphical appearance of the interface elements can be styled. These screenshots uses the Plasma™ default style, Breeze.

  1. The program starter. Usually this will be Application Launcher.

  2. A couple of icons giving easy access to often used applications

  3. The Task Manager, which shows the titles of windows belonging to the applications currently running. No application had opened a window, when the screenshot was taken

  4. The System Tray

  5. The Digital Clock widget

  6. The Panel Toolbox

  7. The Desktop Toolbox

  8. A Folder View widget, showing the content of the Desktop folder