More KDE Wayland Fixes Heading Into Plasma 5.20.1

[increasechief]

Will I notice when the future has arrived?

[Riotvan]

Running 5.20 with frameworks 5.75 and the 20.08 apps and so far haven’t noticed any issues. Maybe problems arise when using older versions of the latter two?

[increasechief]

So mostly quality of life improvements for the developers?

[ermo]

Will I notice when the future has arrived?

Ideally, the transition should feel mostly seamless, though I've seen people rave about how smooth Wayland compositors feel.

A compositor in this context is "a software process which composites off-screen buffers for each open window to create a screen image". These images are generated many times a second then sent to the GPU for output to the connected physical monitors.

(source for compositor quote)

To get an idea of what Wayland is supposed to achieve, this quote might prove enlightening:

Kristian Høgsberg, a Linux graphics and X.Org developer who previously worked on AIGLX and DRI2, started Wayland as a spare-time project in 2008 while working for Red Hat.^{[129][130][131][132]} His stated goal was a system in which "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker." Høgsberg was driving through the town of Wayland, Massachusetts when the underlying concepts "crystallized", hence the name.

(source)

[treba]

Can someone tl;dr Wayland for me?

It's basically X12, just with a name that allows the devs to make a clean start without people complaining about not existing legacy features. There are more and more things that are not cleanly feasible on X11 that are possible on Wayland. Proper client isolation, per monitor fractional scaling, good touch support being a few that are visible for users, but from a dev perspective it's way more. For example making use of modern hardware capabilities like hardware overlays for non-fullscreen windows (increasing efficiency). The list is long. That's why Xorg development these days has basically stalled - it's mostly Xwayland, the X11 compatibility layer for Wayland, that still gets attention. But the transition is a long and painful process, unfortunately.

Edit: many of the new features are already available on Win10, MacOS and Android, with X11 having no hope to catch up. So Wayland brings the stack back on par with them - and is arguably even superior in certain areas.

[Kombatant]

KDE with Wayland is still hit and miss unfortunately. Glad they're working on it, they've definitely improved the past few months.

[R41N3R]

Anyone else running into this on Wayland?
Bug 420160 - Session crashes when monitor goes into standby

Yeah, I have this as well, in the past I disabled automatic power off in the settings of my monitor to prevent this. Hope something like this will be addressed soon!

[bug77]

Anyone else running into this on Wayland?
Bug 420160 - Session crashes when monitor goes into standby

Probably very few people. Wayland+Kwin is not usable long enough for the monitor to go into standby

[R41N3R]

Probably very few people. Wayland+Kwin is not usable long enough for the monitor to go into standby

I'm then one of the few. It is not as good as it should be until now, but it works here on several different systems. What issues do you have and on which distribution? Which GPU do you use?

[gregzeng]

Among the reader's comments, I had expected that some had also used Gnome, instead of KDE. Both desktop environments are trying to work with Wayland. Which is better? Which will succeed first?
Is it a matter of leap frog; where each is able to be better, at different times & circumstances?