KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS Released With Much Better Wayland Support, Other Improvements

[Danny3]

You need qt5-virtualkeyboard (note: SDDM isn't the lockscreen).

Thanks for your answer!
But I'm not sure what is qt5-virtualkeyboard
Searching the Internet I found this:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtvirtualkeyboard-index.html

Is that it, is it something that I can install or it's for developers only?
I don't see any instructions on how to install it in KDE Plasma
I thought that KDE Plasma comes by default with some kind of virtual (on-screen) keyboard like Cinnamon and Windows have as part of their assistive technologies.
As for SDDM, I don't know what that is. I was talking about the blue screen which appears when you logout / lock KDE plasma session.

[smartalgorithm]

who else did NOT notice the log-in speed-up?

[R41N3R]

Wayland is still a non-starter for me. Unplugging or turning off the monitor crashes the session (and this will crash resume if the monitor comes up slowly - mine does). Screen rotation simply doesn't work and locks the session hard.

Other than those two absolute show stoppers, it does seem to be working better.

I have the same issue with Linux 4.15 and DC, but I think this is a AMD bug as it works fine with Intel. On my machine with a AMD GPU I had to turn off the sleep mode for the display in the energy settings.

[Sloth]

Wayland is still a non-starter for me. Unplugging or turning off the monitor crashes the session (and this will crash resume if the monitor comes up slowly - mine does). Screen rotation simply doesn't work and locks the session hard.

Other than those two absolute show stoppers, it does seem to be working better.

[geearf]

I just tried Wayland with it, but it didn't work so well for me:

1- No problem starting a game, but on every 'cut' I got my pointer locked and had to hold Esc for 3 seconds or switch Virtual Desktops, which is quite annoying.

2- No Virtual Desktop pager is ok, but no ability to only have some windows in a desktop, which kind of nullifies the whole point of having separate desktops...

3- It probably is just a different setting, but using the mouse wheel in the tab bar in chromium would move by 2 tabs instead of by 1 tab like in X11. If the other 2 were not a problem I would have looked into that.

[R41N3R]

The release of Plasma 5.12 increased my experience on Wayland dramatically. Even the beta worked perfectly already. Compared to the previous releases quality has improved a lot, the serious bugs are fixed and I can now use it as my daily driver on all my Intel and AMD machines. I am really thankful for this great release!
The improvements required now for Wayland are missing Window decoration e.g. on LibreOffice or Virt-Manager (though Gtk might be a little tricky here), mouse pointer locking in games on XWayland (probably we need a new release of Xorg) and fixing the bugs that where a workaround is required today. But nothing critical anymore like in previous releases when I couldn't use Virt-Manager or when I had system freezes during login on Wayland, the scaling was automatically set to 2x or it was blurry. Plasma 5.12 rocks :-)

The new Color Mode in Plasma-Wayland to reduce blue colors at night and multi monitor environements work well (at least on my setup, test on Intel GPU and modesetting).

[R41N3R]

In fact, KDE doesn't even support Intel on Wayland 'cause I can't launch a KDE Wayland session at all whereas GNOME Shell works fine on Wayland with this same Intel card.

On Arch Linux Plasma 5.12 works perfectly with Wayland and Intel. I had issues with my Linux 4.16-git and AMD DC, I couldn't login to Plasma-Wayland, SDDM just freezes, but as soon as I used the stable release of Linux 4.15 it now works as well! The latest mesa-git somestimes creates as well some issues with Plasma-Wayland, so using the stable release of Mesa is recommended.

[Delgarde]

Weak trolling. I give it a 2/10.

Really? If that's a 2, how bad would it have to be to get a 1?

[polarathene]

Too bad memory usage optimization is just not there.

I open Akregator with zero feeds - roughly 250MB of RAM gets lost. What?!

The Plasma process (default configuration) eats up to 250MB of RAM as well with zero plasmoids on the desktop.

In short, boot up an empty plasma session, lose up to 700MB of RAM. So much optimization.

And some plasmoids crash all the time (like the weather applet). That's just not funny any longer.

In contrast I'm still running KDE 3.5.10 with tons of additional utilities (like knetstats which has no alternative in KDE5) and over 60 feeds in Akregator and memory use is under 250MB.

No idea what Akregator is allocating that amount of RAM for, but have you tried using the app? Perhaps you don't see much more allocated and the existing allocated memory is used to up to a certain point before anymore is allocated. What's memory usage of it for you on 3.5 when in use?

Same with the Plasma process, you might find that plasmoids don't have much impact in most cases.

There are distros that boot into plasma session with only 350-450MB of RAM allocated, so you're probably just not on a suitable distro for your needs? Maybe consider KaOS? I use Manjaro personally. Gnome tends to use more than KDE, XFCE I think uses similar amount, can't remember but I think LxQt and i3 also had similar memory usage experience(but these were community spins on Manjaro).

If 3.5 meets your needs that's great, enjoy! For others Plasma 5 offers more for them than 3.5 does, not everyone prioritizes memory usage to such small amounts I have KDE 5.11 working great on a old core 2 duo dual core 2.5GHz 2GB RAM system, and it's running off USB 2.0 stick(32GB using about 15GB). My main system has 32GB RAM averaging 20GB usage, few hundred MB isn't going to make a huge difference for me. Usability/functionality is more important, then resource usage/performance.

What was the knetstats utility doing for you btw that isn't available in modern KDE?

[polarathene]

At least on Kubuntu Artful (as shipped via the KDE updates PPA), plasma 5.12 represents a significant regression on the standard Xorg session. The power buttons (power-off, sleep, wake up) don't work anymore.

Did you just update without a restart? I've noticed when updating certain parts of the OS parts of the DE like that break. You can shutdown via terminal, `sudo shutdown -r now` will restart for you. All those buttons probably work then after the reboot. If not go into System Settings and check power management, should have config options there for all that, perhaps something got borked for you?