KDE Plasma 5.19 Has Better Wayland Support But Their Goal Is Not Yet Complete

[Volta]

The road is still long for KDE, but Gnome is nearly there. There are few things left, but not everyone needs them.

[Mitch]

I'm super hopeful for KDE Wayland and Firefox Wayland to co-exist. Especially with all the amazing work in play here on the Wayland side: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/
I've tested it so far and the Firefox Wayland is just so smooth and has crazy low latency from my testing. Just has some kinks to work out.

Also hoping KDE Wayland can eventually scale a Hi-DPI screen without lowering resolution of the desktop.

Still appreciate all the work RedHat, KDE team, and Mozilla are doing regardless.

[cl333r]

KDE devs in 2014: Wayland support is basically done.
Also KDE devs in 2020: The road is still long to reach feature parity with the venerable X based sessions.

[HighValueWarrior]

KDe developers are very late in wayland integration.

Running it right now and sadly have to agree. Its not horrible but so many little things that add up.
Lets see what 5.19 brings.

[molecule-eye]

Please fix the clipboard on Wayland already...

This is one of the main reasons I don't use Wayland--a clipboard manager is pretty essential for me. The other is the ridiculously buggy multi-monitor support which often crashes my session. At this point, I sort of gave up. i used to test wayland on KDE from time to time but progress has been SUPER slow (compared to gnome).

[bug77]

I think the best figure would be 2021 since Wayland support is one of the 3 goals set for the project by the community last year
https://dot.kde.org/2019/09/07/kde-d...tency-and-apps

That's exactly the game I don't want to play: guessing based on bits and pieces.

[TemplarGR]

KDe developers are very late in wayland integration.

KDE devs ignore anything that isn't important for Qt. This has been the reality since KDE's inception. Qt treats Wayland as a second-rate citizen, so does KDE. It is not rocket science. It is just that KDE developers hadn't realized up until recently that Wayland support in GNOME was so advanced that it began to have actual benefits in software like Firefox that X11 lacks. Right now KDE is like a dinosaur in comparison. Give it a couple of years and GNOME will leave KDE forever behind, with all major software supporting Wayland and performing better on GNOME. Unless KDE devs stop messing around and redirect their efforts to Wayland support, and put pressure on Qt to do the same (there are still things missing from Qt too).

[bug77]

KDE devs ignore anything that isn't important for Qt. This has been the reality since KDE's inception. Qt treats Wayland as a second-rate citizen, so does KDE. It is not rocket science. It is just that KDE developers hadn't realized up until recently that Wayland support in GNOME was so advanced that it began to have actual benefits in software like Firefox that X11 lacks. Right now KDE is like a dinosaur in comparison. Give it a couple of years and GNOME will leave KDE forever behind, with all major software supporting Wayland and performing better on GNOME. Unless KDE devs stop messing around and redirect their efforts to Wayland support, and put pressure on Qt to do the same (there are still things missing from Qt too).

You do realize that KDE being built on top of Qt, it cannot possibly provide better Wayland support than Qt provides. Qt is backed by an actual money-making company, KDE not so much. So there's little pressure KDE can put on Qt.
And yes, KDE was slow to start working on Wayland, but personally I don't think that will matter in the long run. When people figure out how to do with Wayland everything they are used to doing in X, KDE (and Qt) will add support. And that will be it.

[shmerl]

Hm, so Wacom drawing tablets will now work in Plasma Wayland session?

[hiryu]

Inspired in this story, I decided to try KDE+Wayland on Kubuntu 20.04 (which appears to be 5.18). It's still not perfect... but it's a lot better than the last time I tried it maybe 6-12 months ago.

I've been logged in for maybe 15 minutes and nothing has severely broken. Krunner kept breaking me before and so far appears to still work. There's an annoying issue where konsole starts up at the wrong size, but otherwise seems pretty good. I'm sure there are other issues that I haven't encountered yet... I'm really interesting in trying 5.19 now.

Steam seems to run fine for me, but I haven't tried any games, because the laptop I'm running this on has an integrated Intel GPU as well as an Nvidia GPU. I'm sure it would go a lot worse if I set it to use the Nvidia GPU... Which is definitely a serious drawback until Nvidia support can be settled one way or another.

Think I'll keep using it for a while to see how well it works out for me.