Miskatonic University Press

I installed KDE Plasma as my desktop environment on an old machine that was getting refreshed, and tried Konsave to copy my KDE configuration from my main machine. I’m not a regular Python user and I usually find it difficult to make packages and versions work, so I document what I did here.

First, on my main machine (running Ubuntu and Plasma 5.27), I set up a virtual Python environment, installed Konsave into it, export my KDE profile, then wipe the environment. The last step is to copy the saved file to the other machine.

sudo apt install python3-venv
python3 -m venv konsave-env
source konsave-env/bin/activate
pip install konsave
pip install --upgrade setuptools
konsave -s myconfig
konsave --export-profile myconfig
deactivate
rm -r konsave-env/
scp myconfig.knsv othermachine:

Then on othermachine (running Debian and Plasma 6.3) I ran:

sudo apt install python3-venv
python3 -m venv konsave-env
source konsave-env/bin/activate
pip install konsave
pip install --upgrade setuptools
konsave --apply myconfig
deactivate
rm -r konsave-env/

It didn’t get everything (for example it missed setting up Caps Lock as Ctrl, reversing the scroll on the touchpad, and the desktop colour), but pretty much everything looks right, including Konsole, so it saved me a lot of time. Perhaps the problems came from running different versions of Plasma on the two machines.

Python people probably have a better way of doing this, but it works for me. Many thanks to Konsave!