Thanks for the tip! It made me aware of missing locales, which is probably why I was having issues with i3 as well.

My guess is that I just installed things in the wrong order and it generated a bad config somewhere (e.g. installing plasma-desktop before x or creating a user account without the correct permissions. I don't really know.) I started with: sudo pacman -Syu plasma-desktop plasma-wayland-session kde-applications

Edit: I actually just ran the command and can now load plasma on X11. Weird. I installed some other X packages after xfce started working, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Running plasmashell complained: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found.

First Arch install, first Lemmy post 👋

Failed miserably while installing Plasma, so I settled on xfce because it worked and I actually really like it. I'm a long-time Debian user; installed arch on my pinephone and the difference in performance was astronomical. I still prefer KDE but after banging my head against the wall to get this set up it's almost like eating crab legs.

It tastes good cause you have to work so damn hard for it.

Wallpaper and logo: https://imgur.com/a/pzDo5hP

Wish I had this information last night. Would have saved me like 3 hours.