KDE Moves To GitLab-Based CI, Lands More Plasma Wayland Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Moves To GitLab-Based CI, Lands More Plasma Wayland Fixes

KDE developers remain very busy squashing bugs ahead of the release of Plasma 5.23 that is also known as the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Goes-To-GitLab-CI

[skeevy420]

I hope they fix the spotty font rendering (especially GTK programs...OK, Firefox...) On a fresh Arch install (10-3-21), Plasma 5.22.5, it seemed like every other program had either blurry or funky looking fonts. I'm using a 55" 4K TV, all settings default, bumped up scaling to 225% (same as I use on Windows), synced settings with SDDM, rebooted, SDDM used old settings, logged in, everything but the taskbar scaled correctly (so I manually scaled it), and that's when I noticed all the iffy fonts -- either very sharp with no AA (Qt) or very blurry (GTK).

That's when I logged out, realized I was using a Wayland session, switched to Xorg, logged in, saw that everything looked correctly, synced with SDDM, logged out, and SDDM took the Xorg session settings.

So the fonts don't render right on Wayland, the Wayland taskbar doesn't scale, nor does it sync settings with SDDM in a Wayland session.

[JustK]

[...] bumped up scaling to 225% [...]

Does this also happen with integer scaling? (e.g. 200%, 300% etc)

[bple2137]

I hope they fix the spotty font rendering (especially GTK programs...OK, Firefox...) On a fresh Arch install (10-3-21), Plasma 5.22.5, it seemed like every other program had either blurry or funky looking fonts. I'm using a 55" 4K TV, all settings default, bumped up scaling to 225%

They won't until this https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayla...ls/-/issues/47 is figured out. Use 200% scale factor for now.

[skeevy420]

Does this also happen with integer scaling? (e.g. 200%, 300% etc)

I changed back to 200% on Xorg a few days ago so when I switched back to Wayland it looked like it was at 0 scaling even though the settings said 200%. I changed the scaling to 175 and back to 200 to "fix" that (which gave random scaling issues that were fixed with login refresh). After that I logged out and back on and Qt fonts look fine (maybe better than X) but I'm getting a headache typing this in Firefox (fonts are both blurry and aliased) so I'm gonna post this and switch back to Xorg.

[JustK]

[...] After that I logged out and back on and Qt fonts look fine (maybe better than X) but I'm getting a headache typing this in Firefox (fonts are both blurry and aliased) so I'm gonna post this and switch back to Xorg.

This sounds like firefox runs under XWayland, which has no support for hidpi/upscaling. I think your missing the relevant environment variables. Firefox shows crisp fonts under my sway session. So this is how I do it: I long gave up on SDDM and use a systemd unit to start sway:

[Unit]
Description=Sway autologin (%i@tty1)
After=systemd-user-sessions.service plymouth-quit.service systemd-logind.service
[email protected]

[Service]
User=%i
Group=%i
WorkingDirectory=~
Environment=XDG_SEAT=seat0
EnvironmentFile=-%E/systemd/env/hidpi.env
EnvironmentFile=-%E/systemd/env/wayland.env
EnvironmentFile=%E/systemd/env/sway.env
EnvironmentFile=-%E/systemd/env/sway-%i.env
EnvironmentFile=-/home/%i/.config/systemd/env/gui.env
PAMName=login
# A virtual terminal is needed.
TTYPath=/dev/tty1
TTYReset=yes
TTYVHangup=yes
TTYVTDisallocate=yes
# Fail to start if not controlling the tty.
StandardInput=tty-fail
# Log this user with utmp, letting it show up with commands 'w' and 'who'.
UtmpIdentifier=tty1
UtmpMode=user
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sway $OPTS
Restart=always
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

This pulls in various .env files the relevant is wayland.env:

CLUTTER_BACKEND="wayland"
GDK_BACKEND="wayland"
QT_QPA_PLATFORM="wayland"
QT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_WINDOWDECORATION=1
#SDL_VIDEODRIVER="wayland"
XDG_SESSION_TYPE="wayland"

I think the first to lines should force firefox to use native wayland and in turn correctly upscale.
Just try it in a terminal and on success write a little shell script or .destop file
I hope this helps.

[birdie]

It looks terrifying that high profile projects like KDE are still struggling with full Wayland support having started with it many years ago. Makes you really doubt we'll ever have any other full-featured Wayland DEs aside from Gnome and KDE. So much for a lean Wayland protocol. It's so lean, it's looks almost unusable. Maybe just maybe one day we'll have a common Wayland server implementation but I don't have much hope if any. Wayland was seemingly created with Gnome running under Linux/KMS in mind and that's about it. Portability, code reuse and a set of common APIs for all Wayland clients are out of the window.

[cl333r]

It looks terrifying that high profile projects like KDE are still struggling with full Wayland support having started with it many years ago. Makes you really doubt we'll ever have any other full-featured Wayland DEs aside from Gnome and KDE. So much for a lean Wayland protocol. It's so lean, it's looks almost unusable. Maybe just maybe one day we'll have a common Wayland server implementation but I don't have much hope if any. Wayland was seemingly created with Gnome running under Linux/KMS in mind and that's about it. Portability, code reuse and a set of common APIs for all Wayland clients are out of the window.

If you read bple2137's answer:

They won't until this https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayla...ls/-/issues/47 is figured out. Use 200% scale factor for now.

And read a little from the link you'll notice that, apparently, the devs don't even have a common approach and opinion how to implement a certain feature, like scaling, that would be best in every possible scenario because features turn out to be more complicated than planned.

[darkbasic]

the devs don't even have a common approach and opinion how to implement a certain feature, like scaling, that would be best in every possible scenario because features turn out to be more complicated than planned.

I wan't say so. There has been quite some talk about it, but I'd say that everybody agrees on the path ahead now and things just need to be implemented.

[om26er]

KDE, please move your bug reporting away from Bugzilla. That's the biggest hurdle in stopping people from reporting bugs. For bugs to be fixed, we need to make the process of reporting them super easy. Bugzilla, IMO is unwelcoming.