KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features

[tildearrow]

I hope it ends up making a difference. I'm worried though also kind of happy that Kwin-latency may be at the end of it's days due to roman's optimizations to kwin.

Except that even after the Roman Gilg era KWin-lowlatency is not going to die.

They will never, ever merge full-screen unredirection... plus you'll know more about it later

[zoomblab]

This is release is too late for Kubuntu 20.04. So we'll get the usual LTS mismatch...
Then again, I've switched to short term support Ubuntu's and the only thing that broke was the Android emulator, so maybe it'll be fine

Nope. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is due for release in April and will ship KDE Plasma 5.18 as the default desktop.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/kde-plasma-5-18-lts-features

[darkbasic]

I just tried it and Wayland support is still a complete disaster:
- firefox does not work natively on wayland (I have to switch to a different window and then back to firefox to see the interface refresh)
- all xwayland applications are BLURRY (I have scaling factor set to 2 in Plasma settings)

[Baguy]

I just tried it and Wayland support is still a complete disaster:
- firefox does not work natively on wayland (I have to switch to a different window and then back to firefox to see the interface refresh)
- all xwayland applications are BLURRY (I have scaling factor set to 2 in Plasma settings)

Subsurface rendering support is still missing/broken. For the blurriness, Kwin relies on a filter to cleanup the scaling. Are you using OpenGL 3.0, and are you sure your on Plasm 5.18 and Kwin 5.18 and not something like Kwin 5.17.4?

[Baguy]

Except that even after the Roman Gilg era KWin-lowlatency is not going to die.

They will never, ever merge full-screen unredirection... plus you'll know more about it later

Just tried your Kwin-lowlatency for 5.18, and WOW! It really did make a difference! I don't know what it is, but it's running better than Kwin-lowlatency on 5.17.

[bug77]

Hm, I'm not sure whether it's KDE or Arch, but for me the night light widget does nothing. I can only toggle night light from the settings.

Edit: It's not Arch, it doesn't work on Tumbleweed either

[nuetzel]

Except that even after the Roman Gilg era KWin-lowlatency is not going to die.

They will never, ever merge full-screen unredirection... plus you'll know more about it later

Hello @tildearrow,

can you please resend your KWin-lowlatency repro?
Besides that I compiled KDE last around 1998/1999 (!!!) I've more than interested.
Maybe I can invite the openSUSE TW maintainer...
Good job!

[darkbasic]

Subsurface rendering support is still missing/broken. For the blurriness, Kwin relies on a filter to cleanup the scaling. Are you using OpenGL 3.0, and are you sure your on Plasm 5.18 and Kwin 5.18 and not something like Kwin 5.17.4?

I'm using 5.18.0 on Arch Linux with an Intel Broadwell APU and 2x scaling. At least on Xorg I'm using the OpenGL 3.1 renderer, didn't check while I was using Wayland but unless it changed by itself it should be the same.
The whole experience has been terrible under Wayland: it scales the UI worse than on Xorg, Chromium is blurry, Firefox does not work (or it's blurry on XWayland), vscode is blurry. The softwares I spend 99% of my time on simply don't work well enough. Of course I could compile chromium-ozone and electron-ozone, but considering Firefox didn't work on Wayland I fear it would be a waste of time. Especially because even Plasma applications like the system settings started to corrupt the font rendering after a while. It's simply not worth it right now, unless you desperately need per-screen scaling.

[Baguy]

I'm using 5.18.0 on Arch Linux with an Intel Broadwell APU and 2x scaling. At least on Xorg I'm using the OpenGL 3.1 renderer, didn't check while I was using Wayland but unless it changed by itself it should be the same.
The whole experience has been terrible under Wayland: it scales the UI worse than on Xorg, Chromium is blurry, Firefox does not work (or it's blurry on XWayland), vscode is blurry. The softwares I spend 99% of my time on simply don't work well enough. Of course I could compile chromium-ozone and electron-ozone, but considering Firefox didn't work on Wayland I fear it would be a waste of time. Especially because even Plasma applications like the system settings started to corrupt the font rendering after a while. It's simply not worth it right now, unless you desperately need per-screen scaling.

With my Vega 8 on my 3500U and my desktop's RX 590, i have had no issues with the fractional scaling on Wayland. I don't personally use integer scales. Does it look clear with a fractional value? Might want to make a bug report.

[tildearrow]

Hello @tildearrow,

can you please resend your KWin-lowlatency repro?
Besides that I compiled KDE last around 1998/1999 (!!!) I've more than interested.
Maybe I can invite the openSUSE TW maintainer...
Good job!

Sure. It is here.