KDE Plasma 5.13 Is Making Great Improvements On Its Wayland Support

KDE Plasma 5.13 that is due for release in June will have a great number of improvements to its Wayland support for allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to work much better on this alternative to the X.Org Server.

KDE developer Roman Gilg has provided a nice summary of some of the Wayland improvements in the queue for the Plasma 5.13.0 release due out towards the middle of June.

Among the progress being made is no longer setting the QT_QPA_PLATFORM environment variable so that Qt5 applications not supporting Wayland won't break, thereby allowing a clean fallback to using XWayland while KDE Qt5 applications have the proper logic for going ahead and using Wayland. KDE Plasma 5.13 will also have the initial plumbing for Wayland screencasting support using xdg-desktop-portal and PipeWire, a Wayland mouse KCM configuration module using libinput, DMA_BUF-based Wayland buffer handling, per-output color correction support, and other improvements.

The good news is there's a KDE Plasma developer sprint happening this week and there still is one month to go until the Plasma 5.13 beta, so there still is the opportunity for more improvements to land in this summer's release. More details on the Wayland improvements coming for KDE Plasma 5.13 via Roman Gilg's blog.