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

[betam4x]

Until they fix both NVIDIA and multi-monitor support, it is a no-go for the majority of users.

[Morty]

Qt treats Wayland as a second-rate citizen,

Well this simply sums up how clueless you are. Or you should have know that paying customers of Qt have shipped large number(100k-1Ms) of devices running Wayland and Qt. And they have done this for years, so Wayland is obviously important for the Qt company.

[bug77]

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.

Despite the likes you got, there's no contradiction or irony there. Wayland itself was far from something resembling feature parity with X back in 2014, so supporting that version of Wayland didn't yield something usable on the desktop. 2014 was back when people insisted Wayland was done because it was being used in some embedded devices.

[JackLilhammers]

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).

They've been treating their users as first class citizens! They waited because Wayland wasn't nearly ready. And they're working mostly on it these days, because Wayland came a long way, KDE users asked for support, and the devs listened. The same can't be said for Gnome devs.
Are you aware that the biggest player (by far) in the Linux desktop still isn't using Wayland by default? And won't be for at the very least other 2 years. Because if Wayland won't have reached feature parity by 22.04 Ubuntu will revert to X for 2 years more.

[MadeUpName]

Support for the Wayland Tablet Protocol for tablet touch and pen pressure, among related capabilities.

Any chance this makes it easier for third parties to make drivers for their devices than it was under X?

[insilications]

Until they fix both NVIDIA and multi-monitor support, it is a no-go for the majority of users.

This.

[Azrael5]

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).

Indeed, it's a problem of development team. They have to concentrate the effort in Wayland migration instead of wasting time in innovation on what is legacy. If not gnome developers, will be Microsoft. I have written since years that linux team should have to work for Wayland integration to get much more reliable as well as faster operating systems making native Wayland applications so to expand the market share. The real advantages of every platform is the core. So the aim is to work before on the core and then on the peripheral programmation which has to be adapted to the core in quick time. Wayland was introduced longer than 12 years ago. Too much time has passed since then.

[Azrael5]

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.

I remember that. In fact, I was excited for that advise which was a sad lie. I'm a KDe user and I actually consider PLASMA the best desktop environment. So, I'm not a cretin fanboy.

[bug77]

Any chance this makes it easier for third parties to make drivers for their devices than it was under X?

Drivers aren't made for X or Wayland. It works the other way around.

[Alejandro Nova]

Drivers aren't made for X or Wayland. It works the other way around.

You are right and wrong, unfortunately.

OSS driver stack (Intel, AMD): You are completely right.
NVIDIA driver stack: Unfortunately for us users, you are wrong. NVIDIA basically rewrote the X server in their driver. Remember they had proprietary drivers when the thing was called XFree86, and so, their way of working is so noughties.