Since the introduction of Plasma widgets in KDE4, the whole desktop took a new direction, starting to become a more interactive way to communicate with the user, to say nothing about the fact that a desktop with widgets will look more beautiful than a plain, icon-only desktop.

Below is an overview of 10 plasmoids for KDE with screenshots, which either come by default in KDE or can be downloaded online. To get and install new plasmoids from the Internet, make sure your widgets are unlocked, then right-click on the desktop, select Add Widgets… and then click the Get new widgets button.

Yahoo! Weather Widget

The Yahoo! Weather plasmoid provides information like temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed, as well as a forecast for the next few days. To will need only to provide a WOEID, which is a code that you can find out here.

Folder

The folder widget was included in KDE by default from the early days of KDE4, and it was quite controversial at the time, because at first it confused people that were used to a classic desktop. I find folder view very useful, especially because you can select any folder to view, and it provides pop-up previews of files and sub-directories in a folder.

Folder allows you to configure icon sorting, arrangement, behavior and text:

Folder provides previews of files and sub-folders:

Plasmacon

Although I normally use Yakuake to have quick access to a terminal in KDE, Plasmacon comes in handy for performing quick commands. Plasmacon will embed a terminal on your desktop, it uses by default the Konsole settings and profiles, and you can save its position and size.

Comic Strip

This plasmoid allows you to install various comics from the Internet and display them on your desktop. You can select next or previous comics and display them as full-sized image.

System Monitor

This plasmoid is composed of several modules which can be shown or hidden. There is hardware information, temperature, network, hard disk and memory monitoring. Each of them can be configured.

Now Playing

The nice thing about Now Playing is that it doesn’t only support players like Amarok or Clementine, but also Audacious. Now Playing also has buttons to stop or play the next song.

RSSNOW

RSSNOW is a feed reader plasmoid which allows you to add as many feeds as you want, view next and previous feeds, configure the auto-switch feed interval, updates fetching interval, enable or disable animations.

Simple System Monitor

This widget will display information such as date and time, uptime, CPU temperature, OS, kernel version, available memory. You can choose from three different backgrounds (default, crystal and translucent), change the background logo, the critical and high temperature threshold, display temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Dictionary

This is a simple plasmoid embedding an English dictionary.

Calculator

This is a a tiny desktop calculator with only the basic features. Very useful for quick calculations, but lacks modes such as scientific.