KDE Developers End July With More Improvements For Plasma 5.20

[bug77]

I don't know if I hate them. I see pros and cons. It takes a while to set it up (finding the right sensir was re hardest task for me) which might turn some people mad.
The biggest issue I have is a memory leak. Or something like that. I have plasmashell use something in the gigabytes just with an idling desktop. Occasionally the memory gets freed. But usually I had to reboot before that - somehow free memory "disappears", probably eaten by the intel iGPU? No idea what happens. As usual the bugreport stalls. As the system is unusable I went off to gnome-shell. After a small hickup with tracker (which forcefully turned off my laptop due to overheating - thx!) I am happy.

No leaking Plasma here. A little over 300MB used, ~3hr uptime so far.
Haven't noticed leaks in years either (I keep an eye out every time out xfce aficionados start their "xfce is light, others are heavy" argument - that is, quite often). Must be something your distro sets or a particular setup.

[Sonadow]

I don't know about Plasma 5.20, but Kwin_wayland-5.14 (which is what is shipped with Debian 10) has the following problems:

• Cannot launch a Firefox Wayland instance: trying to do so either returns an error on the console that it cannot speak to the compositor, or draws a window that cannot be updated (window is stuck with content that never redraws)
• Cannot launch a Chromium Ozone + Wayland instance (same issues as above)
• Extremely slow Kwrite performance: dragging and highlighting extremely long text strings that line break across more than 10 lines causes KWrite to stall and in some cases, crash with an error on the console about broken communications with the compositor
• General all-round slower performance on Wayland

[Termy]

I don't know about Plasma 5.20, but Kwin_wayland-5.14 (which is what is shipped with Debian 10) has the following problems:

• Cannot launch a Firefox Wayland instance: trying to do so either returns an error on the console that it cannot speak to the compositor, or draws a window that cannot be updated (window is stuck with content that never redraws)
• Cannot launch a Chromium Ozone + Wayland instance (same issues as above)
• Extremely slow Kwrite performance: dragging and highlighting extremely long text strings that line break across more than 10 lines causes KWrite to stall and in some cases, crash with an error on the console about broken communications with the compositor
• General all-round slower performance on Wayland

from 5.14 to 5.19 (haven't tried 5.20 yet), plasma wayland has gone from barely usable to almost ready for primetime (for me), so if you want to use it, debian is not the way to go i guess ^^

[mykolak]

I've tried wayland on 5.19.4 today and while it's not horrible as was earlier, it's still unusable for me:

1. Selection buffer still doesn't work.
2. Right click on window header shows hard to close context menu.
3. Resizing desktop options much better now, but is still flashes from time to time.
4. Global menu as button on header still broken to unusable state (menus with window headers, all opening in one place and closing without a reason).
5. Menu button in Falkon shows menu in different place.
6. MPV window isn't embed into SMPlayer.
7. Text in system setting looks ugly before resize.
8. Cursors look ugly.
9. Text looks not fine.
10. X applications like Steam and Chromium are blurry. And cursors overs them looks even uglier.
11. No window previews in panel.
12. Firefox flashes without a reason (visible/invisible content) and have artifacts.

NB. I have one screen with 125% and second with 150%. This is I think a reason for 7-10. But still, this is a problem of Wayland, that it doesn't support fractional scaling, so KWin has to emulate it with integer scaling and then resing to lower size.

[Vistaus]

No leaking Plasma here. A little over 300MB used, ~3hr uptime so far.
Haven't noticed leaks in years either (I keep an eye out every time out xfce aficionados start their "xfce is light, others are heavy" argument - that is, quite often). Must be something your distro sets or a particular setup.

It's also fun to note that it's not just KDE: Qt itself is also pretty lightweight. Running Deepin here, which is also built on Qt, and it uses about 250 MB.

[tildearrow]

I've tried wayland on 5.19.4 today and while it's not horrible as was earlier, it's still unusable for me:

1. Selection buffer still doesn't work.
2. Right click on window header shows hard to close context menu.
3. Resizing desktop options much better now, but is still flashes from time to time.
4. Global menu as button on header still broken to unusable state (menus with window headers, all opening in one place and closing without a reason).
5. Menu button in Falkon shows menu in different place.
6. MPV window isn't embed into SMPlayer.
7. Text in system setting looks ugly before resize.
8. Cursors look ugly.
9. Text looks not fine.
10. X applications like Steam and Chromium are blurry. And cursors overs them looks even uglier.
11. No window previews in panel.
12. Firefox flashes without a reason (visible/invisible content) and have artifacts.

NB. I have one screen with 125% and second with 150%. This is I think a reason for 7-10. But still, this is a problem of Wayland, that it doesn't support fractional scaling, so KWin has to emulate it with integer scaling and then resing to lower size.

Wow, I agree. I can reproduce 2, 8, 10 and 12.

On HiDPI the compositor just messes everything up. You literally have to use a non-HiDPI monitor for it, otherwise:

- Plasma Desktop has horribly huge margins, due to wrong scaling. It appears the fonts are being scaled 2x, and on top of that the widgets 2x more. Therefore 4x.
- The Oxygen theme has flawed borders. The halo looks like it is getting off the window.
- Sometimes a cursor is small, but most of the time it is giant (4x). Then there are times in where the cursor is different.
- There is no way to have X11 HiDPI applications due to the forced scaling.

[Vistaus]

- Sometimes a cursor is small, but most of the time it is giant (4x). Then there are times in where the cursor is different.

I can reproduce that on X11 with no HiDPI scaling, so I think that's a more general bug.

[schmalzler]

No leaking Plasma here. A little over 300MB used, ~3hr uptime so far.
Haven't noticed leaks in years either (I keep an eye out every time out xfce aficionados start their "xfce is light, others are heavy" argument - that is, quite often). Must be something your distro sets or a particular setup.

Great for you.
As written in the bug report I didn't have an issue with plasma-5.18, problems started with plasma-5.19.
Before that I also had <300MB.
Here is a more recent report to my issue reported by a Fedora user (I am on Arch):
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424636
So there are several people who can reproduce, so there is a good chance this is real.

But even before 5.19 there were reported leaks, e.g. for activity switching:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411637
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422755
or regarding notifications:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423594

There are also older open bugs when searching for "memory leak" in the bug tracker.
Have fun digging through them!

[bug77]

Great for you.
As written in the bug report I didn't have an issue with plasma-5.18, problems started with plasma-5.19.
Before that I also had <300MB.
Here is a more recent report to my issue reported by a Fedora user (I am on Arch):
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424636
So there are several people who can reproduce, so there is a good chance this is real.

But even before 5.19 there were reported leaks, e.g. for activity switching:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411637
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422755
or regarding notifications:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423594

There are also older open bugs when searching for "memory leak" in the bug tracker.
Have fun digging through them!

Well, I never meant your issue isn't real. Just that it's not something that doesn't happen for everyone, thus it's one of those that will take some time to track down and fix properly