KDE Plasma 5.22 Released With Much Better Wayland Support, Usability Enhancements

[ssokolow]

Wonderful, couldn't be happier to be a KDE Plasma user !
But still, I wish in the future they put some focus on privacy and security too like adding a way to manage access control to webcam / mike / location / network.

That's what the Flatpak and Pipewire side of things is dealing with... unless you mean that they're slacking on implementing GUI prompts in xdg-desktop-portal-kde.

The actual implementation is achieved by using Linux's cgroups system to put the application in a sandbox where it can't see the device nodes for what it's not allowed to access, and where it's in a separate network namespace not bridged to the others if it's denied network access.

Unfortunately, location on a desktop PC can't be gated that way because it's implemented as "Google pins down the physical location of your LAN's public IP by having any Android phones connected to your WiFi phone home to match up the IP they're connecting from with what their GPS and other location mechanisms see." If, like me, you live in the countryside, seeing that degree of accuracy out of Google's search page footer is creepy as hell and you need a VPN to beat it.

(Speaking of which, I still need to figure out where the correct bug tracker is to file a feature report for a Flatpak permission that grants network access to routable networks only (i.e. no 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, etc.), so a compromise in a Flatpak'd application that has no need for LAN access can't be used as a relay to attack things behind the edge firewall like unpatched/out-of-support network printers and IoT lightbulbs and the like.)

[ms178]

you could use manjaro-architect (not the ISO, the CLI-Installer) instead of calamares, worked very well for my for a btrfs install.

That would have been the answer given to me from the Calamares devs a year ago (as they said so themselves), but as manjaro-architect is no longer actively maintained, they came back to me with a long and complicated list to make it work. But that is too involved for my taste - Ubuntu and Suse manage that perfectly without any hassle, unfortunately that limits my choice of distros as the RAID partition is the dedicated one to play around with Linux adventures in my setup.

[Aryma]

wake me up when they decide to rewrite or make new "Wayland compositors"

[tildearrow]

Typo:

KDE Plasma 5.22 also delivers on adaptive panel transparency for the panel and wigets,

[rhavenn]

I have tried Manjaro, Tumbleweed, and Neon and none of them work as well as Arch with the kde-meta package. They might have a little better polish in certain areas, but they all had bugs. The Arch packages just work once you install the right ones and then it's up to you to polish what you want.

[mdedetrich]

I feel that way about every install of every distribution with any desktop environment.

Sure, the difference is just greater with Manjaro.

Also historically speaking, brand new point releases with KDE can have some issues that may need to iron out (this has happened a couple of times in the past years). Manjaro tests for this before pushing it out to their repos.

[kvuj]

With SDDM getting wayland support, I'm thinking about switching to Arch + KDE + Wayland.

Could anyone comment on any problem they encountered with Wayland? I'm currently looking at the KDE page for wayland showstoppers, but there doesn't seem to be any deal breaker for me so I'm curious about your experiences.

[ms178]

wake me up when they decide to rewrite or make new "Wayland compositors"

The KwinFT project might be of interest for you (https://gitlab.com/kwinft/kwinft/-/commits/master). I haven't tried it on Wayland yet, but the X11 experience was already better than stock Kwin even in its current state.

[ResponseWriter]

Could anyone comment on any problem they encountered with Wayland? I'm currently looking at the KDE page for wayland showstoppers, but there doesn't seem to be any deal breaker for me so I'm curious about your experiences.

My issues depend a bit on whether I'm on my Intel laptop or AMD desktop. On Intel graphics it runs well enough. With 5.22 beta on AMD graphics Gwenview will crash when dragging an image, and my whole session stopped responding after I switched the screen off for a few hours (system still running). In fact, even on X11 plasmashell stops responding if the screen is off for hours so it may not be Wayland specific, but on X I can switch tty.

In other ways the Wayland session is better so I'd say try it because what doesn't work for me might not be an issue for you.

[Danny3]

That's what the Flatpak and Pipewire side of things is dealing with... unless you mean that they're slacking on implementing GUI prompts in xdg-desktop-portal-kde.

The actual implementation is achieved by using Linux's cgroups system to put the application in a sandbox where it can't see the device nodes for what it's not allowed to access, and where it's in a separate network namespace not bridged to the others if it's denied network access.

Unfortunately, location on a desktop PC can't be gated that way because it's implemented as "Google pins down the physical location of your LAN's public IP by having any Android phones connected to your WiFi phone home to match up the IP they're connecting from with what their GPS and other location mechanisms see." If, like me, you live in the countryside, seeing that degree of accuracy out of Google's search page footer is creepy as hell and you need a VPN to beat it.

(Speaking of which, I still need to figure out where the correct bug tracker is to file a feature report for a Flatpak permission that grants network access to routable networks only (i.e. no 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, etc.), so a compromise in a Flatpak'd application that has no need for LAN access can't be used as a relay to attack things behind the edge firewall like unpatched/out-of-support network printers and IoT lightbulbs and the like.)

I want at least a pop-up window to ask me when some program tries to access my webcam, mike, location.
And then have a list with all of them, like a table with the program name and which devices it I have given / denied it to access.
Something similar to how it is on Android.
I don't know what Flatpak is trying to solve because I have not seen any pop-up to ask for my permission for anything.
Even after I have installed Flatseal.

For location, I want to stop programs from getting the list of Wifi networks around me and send it online to get my precise location.
This is a huge risk for me and my family privacy and security.

I know that Google can still get my location from other phones, but at least my phone is using LineageOS with no Google apps and I'm trying to solve one problem at a time.

Firefox is probably the only nice program that asks you by itself when some website want you access your webcam / mike / location, but why should we rely on a program to implement this kind of permissions ?

Many of them don't, even if they are open source.
With closed source ones it's probably even worse.

I had to put tape on my webcam and mike because KDE Plasma does absolutely nothing to protect me against programs that want to grab video or audio from my home.
Hopefully things will improve in the future.