Wayland For KDE Plasma 5.9 Should Shape Up Quite Nicely

Plasma 5.8 was only released at the beginning of October but already there has been a number of Wayland improvements queuing up for the next milestone, Plasma 5.9.

KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin wrote a blog post yesterday about some of the early Wayland changes coming for Plasma 5.9. Some of this early work for the next KDE Plasma 5 release includes resize-only borders, global shortcut handling, support for keyboard LEDs via libinput, relative pointer support, the color scheme syncing to the window decoration, window icon improvements, multi-screen improvements, panel imporvements, and more.

Aside from the visual improvements around better multi-screen and panel on Wayland, the relative pointer support is important. Pointer confinement is also planned for the Plasma 5.9 release but not yet complete. These pointer features are particularly important for gaming and have been implemented by other Wayland compositors and can also be handled by SDL 2.0.5, etc.

More details on these early Plasma 5.9 Wayland improvements via Martin's blog. Other Plasma 5.9 and beyond planning via this recent article: KDE Plasma Looking At Global Menu, Wayland & Mobile For 2017.

Plasma 5.9.0 is tentatively scheduled for release on 31 January.