KDEINIT5(8)

💅 kdeinit5 — the launcher bestie 💅

okay so this is from the kdeinit5 User's Manual (that's the KDEINIT5(8) page, section 8, system admin girlies rise up) ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

kdeinit5 — the launcher for apps built with kdeinit support, and for KIO slaves. she's the one who gets everybody on the dance floor 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

kdeinit5 [--help] [[--no-fork] | [--no-kded] | [--suicide]] [[+programs]
         | [programs]]

look at her. so structured. so iconic 👑

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so kdeinit5 is a process launcher, right? think of it as the famous init used for booting UNIX, but make it fashion. she runs KDE programs and kdeinit loadable modules (KLMs), and she starts them way more efficiently. no cap. 🔥

using kdeinit5 to launch KDE applications makes starting a typical KDE app a couple times faster and reduces memory consumption by a substantial amount. she's literally doing both. main character energy fr fr.

here's the tea on how: kdeinit5 is linked against all the libraries a standard KDE application needs. with this technique, starting an application becomes much faster, because now only the application itself needs to be linked — whereas otherwise both the application and all the libraries it uses need to be linked. that's the whole trick. she already knows everybody so you don't have to introduce yourself 40 times 💅

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😭 DISADVANTAGES 😭

not everything is slay, bestie. the process name of applications started via kdeinit5 is "kdeinit5". yeah. all of them. same name. it's giving "we all share one group chat username" 💀

this problem can be corrected to a degree by changing the application name as shown by ps. however — and this is the part that hurts — applications like killall will only see kdeinit5 as the process name. so to workaround this, use kdekillall (from kdesdk/scripts) for applications started via kdeinit5. noted. writing it down. 🫶

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• --help — show help about options. she's helpful like that. queen behavior 👑
• --no-fork — do not fork, i.e. do not exit until all the executed programs ends. she's staying until the party's over. committed 🥹
• --no-kded — do not start kded. respectfully, no kded today 🙈
• --suicide — terminate when no KDE applications are left running. dramatic name, honestly iconic, she simply refuses to be the last one at the function 💀
• +programs — runs the programs handling requests ✨
• programs — runs the programs without handling requests. same but different. the plus sign is doing SO much work here 🦋

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🌈 USAGE 🌈

a standard way to run this program is by simply specifying the following command at the prompt: kdeinit5 program or kdeinit5 +program. that's it. that's the whole vibe. go off 🫶

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /tmp/kde-$USER/kdeinit5_$INSTANCE — ... (yeah, that's literally what the page says. mysterious. cryptic. lowkey iconic 🎀)

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🧚 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🧚

• $HOME — specifies the home directory of the current user 🏠
• $KDE_HOME_READONLY — specifies if the home directory of the current user is read only 🔒
• $KDE_IS_PRELINKED — if set, tells kdeinit5 that the KDE programs are pre-linked.
  • (prelinking is a process that allows you to speed up the process of dynamic linking.) ngl that's a lot of the word "process" but we move ✨
• $KDE_DISPLAY — if set, tells kdeinit5 that it is running on a KDE desktop 🖥️💖

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

kded5, kdekillall — go read those too, iykyk 📚

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💀 BUGS 💀

please use KDE's bugtracker[1] to report bugs. be nice to the bugtracker, she's doing her best 🙏

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🌟 AUTHORS 🌟

• Waldo Bastian <bastian@kde.org> — Author. 👑
• Mario Weilguni <mweilguni@sime.com> — Author. 👑
• Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org> — Author. 👑

three authors. three icons. we stan. 🫶

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📝 NOTES 📝

1. KDE's bugtracker — http://bugs.kde.org

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okay bestie that's the whole page, no skips, no cuts, every flag accounted for 💖 and one last thing before you go: this was brought to you by KDE Frameworks, Frameworks 5.0, dated 2013-12-18, filed under KDEINIT5(8) — so like, she's been serving this look since 2013 and she's still that girl. periodt. 💅✨🎀