KDE Plasma 5.12 Reaches Beta With Faster Start-Up Time, Better Wayland Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.12 Reaches Beta With Faster Start-Up Time, Better Wayland Support

Ahead of the official release expected in February, the KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta is available today as the latest step forward for the KDE desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.12-Beta

[Azrael5]

I'm very happy about this news because now KDe Plasma is ready to be the real best desktop environment for linux distros.

[Danny3]

Too bad Linux Mint devs dropped the KDE edition.
They should've waited one more year so we could've got this awesome version as the last KDE on Mint.

[Noee]

Pretty solid so far on TW with the KDE:Unstable repos, like some others here might be running. Just a coupla showstoppers so far for me:

- hard kwin_wayland crash when disabling a screen using kscreen-doctor. This might be another crasher already reported, but I'm having a hard time repro-ing this.
- KRunner edit field has a focus problem after the first char is typed in (known)

Nits:
- Qt apps context menus (from systray) are showing up in weird places (known)
- Night Color KCM is crashing from systemsettings5. Works from dolphin, however (known)

I'm in a dual-screen setup with my secondary screen as an HDTV connected (HDMI) through a recv'r with a buggy EDID. But, it's being handled properly. RX-560 with DC enabled.

[R41N3R]

A lot of nice changes, but there are still several bugs on Plasma-Wayland that hopefully will be addressed soon... Login to Plasma crashes sometimes the machine (only restart via SSH possible), same happend during logouts or if power settings turn off the display and I return to my machine with a AMDGPU then Plasma-Wayland shows only a black screen. There are input handling issues when running games, ... But I can definitely see a lot of improvements and will do my best to provide some useful feedback until the final release. So I'm positive about Plasma on Wayland with the 5.12 release!

Update1: I did compile kwscreen from Plasma 5.12 beta and it seems to fix the 4k screen scaling issue, now I can set it again to 1x and Plasma will not set it always to 2x after every restart again. I'm very happy this is fixed :-)
Update2: Resizing the panel will crash Plasma, this is fixed now as well with the latest qt5-wayland package on Arch Linux, so next Qt release will be fine.

[lucas_]

So I'm positive about Plasma on Wayland with the 5.12 release!

From the release renouncement:

We have put a lot of work into making Wayland support in Plasma as good as possible but there are still some missing features and issues in certain hardware configurations so we don't yet recommend it for daily use. More information on the Wayland status wiki page.

[torturedutopian]

I'm so happy with all those KDE-related news. I really have the feeling the community / KDE stack is much healthier than a few years back.

Don't know if I have to drop my Nvidia GPU, though. It works so much better (overall smoothness, responsiveness, loading time) with a waaaay slower Intel HD Graphics, and apparently, except if Nvidia's policy changes, it'll get even less supported. Do I really need AAA games ?

[ResponseWriter]

Does anyone know what this means: "We don't have an API yet for virtual desktops, so pager is not working"?

Are there no virtual desktops yet on Wayland or is it just the pager widget?

[gufide]

Does anyone know what this means: "We don't have an API yet for virtual desktops, so pager is not working"?

Are there no virtual desktops yet on Wayland or is it just the pager widget?

Last time I tried plasma on wayland, virtual desktop were working pretty well, except few quirks, but had no pager.

[schmidtbag]

This is good news. Startup time has always been one of KDE's weaknesses (though, with a modern CPU, cut-down services, and an SSD, it is tolerable). So far, my Wayland experience with KDE has mostly been good. So far the only issues I have are:
* Middle-click-paste between non-X windows (a Wayland-specific issue)
* This odd glitch where left-clicking on the desktop sometimes (but not always) results in infinitely appearing right-click menus until plasma crashes
* Events caused by dragging the mouse to the screen edges usually don't work

So, nothing really major.