DriveDeck

A "This PC" window for KDE Plasma 6, inspired by Windows. It shows your personal folders, drives, network locations, printers and devices in one clean window, and it follows your Plasma colours and icon theme.

DriveDeck is a community fork of Fenestra "This PC" by naykkalak. All credit for the original idea, design and code goes to naykkalak. This fork fixes bugs, makes the program faster and adds many new features under its own name. See what is different below, or the detailed CHANGELOG.

Version 2.0.0-beta.3 – feedback and bug reports are very welcome.

---

What the program does

Open it and you see everything about your computer in one place:

• Folders – Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Music, Downloads, Videos. One click opens them in Dolphin.
• Drives – internal disks, USB sticks, memory cards and CD/DVD drives, each with a bar that shows how full they are. You can eject USB sticks safely, rename them and check the disk health.
• Network locations – add a shared folder from another computer or NAS (SMB) without a terminal. Passwords are stored safely in KWallet.
• Printers and devices – printers with their status and ink levels, plus keyboards, mice, game controllers and similar devices.

The window remembers its size, supports 13 languages and uses your own system colours and icons. Drives also show a small live graph of their read and write speed, and warn you when they are almost full.

---

What's different in this fork

Problems that are fixed

What went wrong before	What happens now
On computers with a Btrfs disk, double-clicking your main drive ("Local Disk") opened a strange system folder (/var/tmp).	It opens your home folder, for every user. The main drive is also recognised correctly again (sort order, icon, health check).
The list of drives flickered and an open right-click menu closed by itself every few seconds, because the free space changes all the time.	The list only redraws when something you can actually see has changed.
Network folders with a space in their name (for example My Share) showed up twice.	They show up once.
Version comparison fixed: 1.1.0 was wrongly treated as newer than 1.1, which could trigger a false update notice.	Fixed.
A USB stick could be mistaken for the previous stick after you swapped them.	Every refresh now checks the real device.
A drive that simply had no name could end up with the wrong name, or a drive really named "Local Disk" got renamed.	Unnamed drives get a clear fallback name ("Local Disk" or "Removable Disk"), and real names are left alone.
Two parts of the program could write to the same settings file at the same moment and corrupt it.	They now take turns.
User names containing a % sign could break the network login.	They are now rejected with a clear message.
Opening folders left invisible leftover processes running in the background until the program was closed.	They are cleaned up automatically.
If the scanner tool was not installed, the program kept searching for scanners for nothing.	It stops when the tool is missing.

It is much faster and smoother

• The window opens instantly. Slow checks (disks, disk health, network, printers) now run in the background instead of making the window wait for them.
• Your drives show up immediately when you start the program, because the last known list is remembered.
• One slow device no longer slows down everything. A switched-off NAS used to delay the printer list. Disks, network locations and printers are now handled separately, and many devices are checked at the same time instead of one after another.
• Much less work in the background. The program used to run several system tools every 3 seconds. Now it only takes a tiny look at the system every second and does the full check when something really changes (you plug in a stick, mount a drive, …). Free-space bars are refreshed every 10 seconds.
• Fewer system calls. Information that used to need one request per disk is now collected in a single request.

New features

• Unmounted drives are now visible. A second hard disk, a Windows partition or a USB stick that was not opened automatically shows up as a card marked "Not mounted". Double-click it (or right-click → Mount) and it is connected and opened. Tiny system partitions (boot, recovery, swap, encrypted) are hidden on purpose.
• More right-click options
  • On drives: Mount, Unmount, Open in terminal, Analyze storage, Copy path (folder cards and the Quick access pane also offer Analyze storage)
  • On network locations: Disconnect, Open in terminal, Copy path
• System summary. Compact live chips at the right end of the ribbon: CPU load, RAM used / total, Storage (all mounted local drives together) and network throughput (▲ sent, ▼ received). The bars turn orange at 80 % and red at 90 %. The chips use the free space on the right and hide themselves when the window is too narrow (about 1460 px or less); they pause while the window is minimised.
• Unmount. Unmount in a drive's right-click menu only logs the drive out and leaves it powered on, unlike Safely remove. It is not offered for system folders (/, /boot, /home …) or optical drives.
• System information (HWiNFO-style). The System information button opens a window with six tabs: Overview, CPU & Board (model, family/model/stepping, microcode, caches, governor, board, chipset, BIOS), GPU & Display (VRAM, driver and version, PCIe link, Wayland/X11, KWin, OpenGL, Vulkan), Memory, System & Drivers (kernel, key modules with versions, PipeWire/ALSA) and Network (adapters and drivers). Everything is read in the background and cached for the session. Copy specs copies a short summary for a forum post; Export full report… saves everything as text or JSON. RAM slots and the CPU socket need root: the button Read slot details (administrator) runs dmidecode through pkexec after Plasma asks for your password.

• Disk health that works with USB drives. Many USB enclosures need a special mode before they report SMART data. DriveDeck tries the usual ones for you (SAT, then several NVMe bridge types), asks for your password only once when root rights are needed, and explains clearly when an enclosure simply does not pass SMART through.
• Tools group. A ribbon group with Terminal, System monitor (Plasma System Monitor, otherwise btop or htop) and Analyze storage (Filelight, otherwise Baobab or ncdu) to find what eats your space. The analysis runs on the selected local drive, or on your home folder. Buttons for programs that are not installed are hidden.
• Use it with the keyboard. The arrow keys move through everything: folders, drives, network locations, printers and devices, and the sidebar. Left in the first column jumps into the sidebar, Right on a pinned folder (or Tab) comes back. In the sidebar Right unfolds a folder and then goes to its first sub-folder, Left folds it again or jumps to the parent folder. Enter opens, Space unfolds, Home/End jump to the first/last entry, F5 refreshes, Esc clears the selection and Ctrl+C copies the path.
• Only one window at a time. Starting the program a second time simply brings the existing window to the front.
• Correct name and icon in the task bar. On Wayland the window now shows its real icon and name instead of "python3".
• Live read/write graph per drive. Every drive card shows a small graph of the last minute: green is reading, yellow is writing. Next to it the current read (▼) and write (▲) speed is shown as numbers, e.g. 450 KB/s or 12.4 MB/s. (Needs NumPy; without it graph and numbers are simply not shown.)
• "Almost full" warning. From 80 % usage on, the bar and the ring turn red and the card gets a badge such as "⚠ 90 %".
• Disk temperature. Each drive card shows its current temperature in a small chip (it turns amber and red when the disk gets too warm). It is read from the system's sensors, so it works for NVMe drives out of the box. For SATA drives load the kernel module once with sudo modprobe drivetemp. USB enclosures usually pass the temperature on only through smartctl, and that needs administrator rights (the SMART dialog asks for them once). DriveDeck never asks for a password in the background, so such cards show no chip unless smartctl may run without root on your system (an advanced setup, see the smartmontools documentation). If it can, the chip appears automatically.
• Straight to the right settings. On the cards under Printers and devices, double-click (or right-click → Open settings) a game controller, keyboard, mouse, touchpad or drawing tablet and the matching System Settings page opens right away. Printers still open their properties on double-click.
• Ink levels at a glance. A printer card now shows a small bar for each ink cartridge in its own colour, so you no longer need Properties to see how much is left. Hover it for the exact percentages.
• Quick access – pin your favourite folders. A pane on the left (inspired by the Windows Explorer) keeps the folders you use most. Right-click any folder or drive card and choose Pin to Quick access, press +, or just drag a folder from Dolphin onto the pane. Click opens it, the little pin removes it again, right-click lets you reorder. Below it, This PC shows your drives as a tree: click a drive or folder to unfold it, double-click to open it in Dolphin, and pin any folder you find. You can hide the pane with the Quick access check box in the Show group.
• For tinkerers: the user interface can be exported to a file and loaded from there, which makes it easy to edit with syntax colours (see Developer notes).

A fresher look

• The pie chart in the Properties window is now a smooth donut ring with the percentage in the middle.
• Usage bars are slimmer and rounded, and animate to their value.
• Cards react more softly to the mouse: they fade a highlight in, the icon grows a little, and the selected card gets an accent strip. Folders, drives, network locations and printers all share one hover look: a translucent purple-to-cyan gradient with a glowing gradient border.
• Text is easier to read: labels and subtitles use larger sizes relative to your system font, and secondary text has more contrast.
• Section headers ("FOLDERS", "DEVICES AND DRIVES", …) are in capitals with the item count as a small pill and a line that fades out to the right. Divider lines are softer.

Small things

• The built-in update check is switched off in this fork, because it would point to the original project and suggest replacing this version. (You can switch it back on with your own repository, see the code comment at MAJ_API.)
• New menu texts come with German translations. Other languages show English for the new entries until someone translates them (help is welcome!).
• Programs started from DriveDeck (Terminal, System monitor, Dolphin, …) run completely on their own and no longer hang under DriveDeck in the process tree.
• The program gives unused memory back to the system after heavy work (opening the System information window, minimising).
• Unused leftover code was removed.

---

Requirements

• KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland, same as the original)
• Python 3 with PyQt6 (QtQml, QtQuick) and Kirigami and qqc2-desktop-style
• lsblk and udevadm (almost every Linux system has them)

Optional tools switch on extra features:

Tool	Feature
smartctl / udisks2	Disk health
smbclient	Finding and adding network shares
udisksctl	Mounting, unmounting and safely removing drives
lpstat, ipptool, avahi-browse	Printer status and ink levels
konsole	"Open in terminal", Terminal button
plasma-systemmonitor / btop / htop	System monitor button
filelight / baobab / ncdu	"Analyze storage"
lspci, lscpu, nvidia-smi, glxinfo, vulkaninfo, pactl	Details in System information
dmidecode + pkexec	RAM slots and CPU socket in System information
NumPy (python-numpy)	Live read/write graph on the drive cards

---

Install

The program installs for your user only. The installer checks every requirement above and, on Arch/CachyOS, Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu, offers to install the missing packages for you (it asks for your sudo password once, and only if you agree). It can also switch on the CUPS and Avahi services so that printers show up.

git clone https://github.com/elbecode-dev/DriveDeck.git
cd drivedeck
bash install.sh

Options: --yes installs missing packages without asking, --no-deps skips package installation, --no-desktop-icon skips the desktop shortcut. Package names were checked on Arch/CachyOS; on Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu a wrong name only means that one package is skipped.

The program then appears as DriveDeck in your application menu (and on the desktop unless you use bash install.sh --no-desktop-icon).

To remove it again: bash uninstall.sh (keeps your settings) or bash uninstall.sh --purge (removes everything).

Updating: pull the latest version and run bash install.sh again.

---

Known limitations

• Disconnecting a network share uses the system umount command. If the share was not set up to be unmountable by normal users, you will see a "permission denied" message.
• A network share that is mounted by IP address but saved by host name is not recognised as the same one.
• Removing a saved network location only blanks the stored password in KWallet. KWallet's command line tool cannot delete entries.
• Drive temperature of USB enclosures needs administrator rights (see Disk temperature above), so those cards show no chip by default. The SMART dialog works for them.
• Tested on KDE Plasma 6 (CachyOS) with a Btrfs system disk and an NVIDIA GPU. Other setups should work, but have not been tested by the fork maintainer. This includes AMD/Intel graphics and Wi-Fi details in the System information window, and the package installation on Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu.

---

Developer notes

# Run directly from the source folder
python3 drivedeck.py

# Export the user interface (QML) to a file, edit it, and run from the file
python3 drivedeck.py --dump-qml > drivedeck.qml
DRIVEDECK_QML=drivedeck.qml python3 drivedeck.py

# Allow several windows at once (for testing)
DRIVEDECK_MULTI=1 python3 drivedeck.py

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. If you find a problem, please include the terminal output of python3 drivedeck.py.

---

Credits and licence

• Original project: naykkalak – fenestra-ce-pc
• Icon sets and design ideas as credited in the original project (Fluent UI System Icons by Microsoft, MIT licence; Windows Modern for KDE Plasma 6 by Jeysef; Win11OS-kde by yeyushengfan258). These are not bundled with the program unless the original project bundles them.
• DriveDeck (fork changes, new features, name and icon): Christian, 2026

AI assistance

The changes in this fork were developed by Christian with the help of AI assistants (Claude by Anthropic and Gemini by Google). The code was reviewed and tested by hand on KDE Plasma 6, but as with any software, bugs are possible. Bug reports are welcome.

Licensed under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0 or later (see COPYING), the same as the original. This project is not affiliated with Microsoft or with the original author.