KDE Plasma 5.21 Now In Beta With Much Improved Wayland Support

[darkbasic]

Why even bother with Kde when it Plasma Wayland is still at a beta stage, at best?

Because KDE has been my main desktop environment for the past 20 years?

[zoomblab]

I have one thing to say to (K)Ubuntu. You enable disruptive changes right after and as early as possible after the LTS release. That means if we want Wayland default for 22.04 it should have been done by 20.10 or 21.04 the latest. The last six months suffice only for bug fixing and polishing. That also means that you plan big changes of the next next LTS during the next LTS preparation time.

This is like commons sense to me though I think we lack much of it. I am curious whether we will see things like wayland and pipewire before next LTS. I am not holding my breath.

Kubuntu 20.04 is excellent though.

[theriddick]

what happens when you install stuff like Skype, does it still break the task manager tray icon click space and cause the click zone to be offset on wrong side of screen? I'm probably only person who experienced this, could be a 4k issue also.

[f0rmat]

Glad to hear I am not the only one who has to force shutdown his PC every time Actually, when I shutdown I don't do it daily so my packages usually get upgraded in the meantime. My guess is that package upgrades cause the shutdown issues ...

I have filed at least one bug report on that. (I use KDE Neon). I have noticed big improvement - but it is Neon which, while on Ubuntu LTS, is still a kind of tolling KDE desktop.

[f0rmat]

Great improvements !

I wish now the KDE Applikations are Krenamed Korreckly instead of stupid heterogenous names. (ex to follow : gnome & deepin)

Typo - I kwish now the KDE Applikations are Krenamed Korrekktly.... And when will the rename it from better GTK support to KGTK?

[f0rmat]

It is really good to see that KDE is continuing its focus on polishing what it has as opposed to creating new k-whatevers. The KWin/Wayland work is good and the Plasma System Monitor looks good (ok, new, but building on and extending things that were mostly in place). Krunner is a gem and the Kate improvements look pretty good. However, I will not be using the new kickstart menu - looks too much like old Windows to me. The current kickstart menu is one of those little additions that I really like about KDE - but that is personal preference - and I am glad that it will still be available.

I am on KDE Neon and for WIW, I have noticed steady improvements in screen tearing in multiple monitor setups of different aspect ratios during booting, login and logoff, and screen locking.

[JackLilhammers]

Because KDE has been my main desktop environment for the past 20 years?

Then you can use X for another year, as you did for the last 20 :'D

PS: it's been my desktop too, albeit not for that long

[darkbasic]

Then you can use X for another year, as you did for the last 20 :'D

PS: it's been my desktop too, albeit not for that long

Development on X stalled and some things are just impossible to achieve, like per monitor scaling.

[JackLilhammers]

Yes, I know. The work is being done, it's only a matter of time. I'm quite confident that for 2022* most of the pieces will be in place. Also thanks to the work on Gnome.
*The next LTS release of Ubuntu, and Neon

[Ladis]

Plasma under Wayland is mostly okay now. The Wayland showstopper for me is that anything running in Xwayland has blurry fonts on a HiDPI display which renders (literally) the whole concept of using a Wayland session completely unusable.

IIRC it's the same on Windows, am I wrong?

Windows handles this perfectly - supports both HighDPI apps (the older ones, like X11) and MultiDPI apps (the newer ones, like Wayland). On Linux, you have to choose between those. Means, on X11 you can't handle monitors with different DPIs (in older DEs there was a trick it sent an event the DPI changed and some apps responded to it, some needed restarting), on Wayland even apps which support HighDPI are rendered in LowDPI and stretched (blurry). On Windows, it renders HighDPI apps in the primary monitor's DPI and then stretches as a bitmap on other monitors (in a single-monitor setup you don't know the app is old - it's still crisp). Fun fact: I read somewhere, maybe here on Phoronix, on Fedora/Wayland it uses that hack - it sends the correct DPI and the DPI-changed event like on X11 when you run Chrome/X11 via XWayland (so for users it looks correct, but requires knowing the app will respond to that X11 event).

EDIT: This is the difference between Windows and Linux. On Windows, they just added few more system events an app can respond to (plus the Compatibility tab in the app's properties to force one way or another). On Linux you have to rewrite all the drawing code in your app (or people making the GUI toolkits have to and you have to update your code to use the new version of the toolkit). This causes much faster adoption among apps on Windows than on Linux (especially maintaining 2 codepaths to keep X11 users supported). I understand the security reasons, but I believe there were ways on X11 to work it around (like those apps to separate X11 apps to own processes yet drawing them together on one desktop; Windows had similar issues - I remember all GDI resources, like brushes, were globally shared among all apps to fit in 4 MB of RAM - the minimum requirement for Win95).