KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added

[Chugworth]

Tried the latest Plasma Wayland Session in Arch during the last couple of days. I am pleasantly surprised. Last time i tried it was a bug and crash fest. It seems relatively stable now for daily use.

Yes, I tried Wayland again after the Plasma 5.23 update and now it finally seems usable. There are still bugs here and there, but it's not the terrible experience that it once was.

The worst thing for me at this point seems to be the clipboard. Sometimes I find myself needing to copy something twice before it actually works. Especially Firefox - it can get to the point where the clipboard completely breaks and I have to restart the browser.

I see that X11 finally has smooth scrolling for mice with high-resolution scrollwheels, but strangely enough Wayland still doesn't.

A few things to note - some programs offer a Wayland mode, but you need to make a few config changes for it to be available. KDE Plasma has a debug screen that you can use to see if an app is running in X11 mode. It can be opened with this command:

qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.showDebugConsole

For Firefox, put this in ~/.bash_profile:
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

For Chromium, put this in ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf:
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform
--ozone-platform=wayland

If you use the Signal app, make sure it starts with these switches:
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

[wobble_model]

If it may help, on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers we can see:

• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439135
• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayla...ge_requests/14

I haven't looked for a while at the showstoppers, but there used to be "no remote login" i.e. X11 forwarding, with Wayland and KDE.

Has this been solved?

I saw this seems to have been solved on Gnome with debian.

I am a solid KDE desktop user, excited when we finally get this stuff working for everyone...

[chocolate]

In other news, you still fail to get that people who are playing games on Linux do so knowing full well that performance, stability and/or support isn't yet up to par (and may never be 100% up to par) with Windows, but still choose to do so because to them, playing games "well enough" on Linux sounds infinitely better than playing games "great" on Windows.

Well yes, but dare I say: games already often run better than on Windows for various reasons. Be it controller support, being able to launch at all, frames per second... about the latter, there are people using DXVK on Windows by copying a file in each game's folder! So primitive, right?
Meanwhile, I'm about to finish Yakuza 0, a splendid game that Windows users report can't even save properly.
Let's hope KDE is in good enough shape by the time the Deck reaches users' hands. Cheers.

[birdie]

You are lying. And reddit to my eyes is not a legitimate place to discuss issues. It is known that plenty of Nvidia fanboys/trolls visit AMD's reddit regularly to spread FUD. Due to my profession i have worked on countless systems from all manufacturers and know all too well if Nvidia has good drivers or not. I don't need others' opinions when i can have my own.

So, nothing factual, OK. I have had zero issues in the past 16 years and I'm lying, right. I must have had them but will you please tell me what kind of issues? Because you continue to claim something without providing any proofs. Actually don't. I've finished reading your comment and your sentiment is that you're the final say in everything which makes arguing with you a complete waste of time. Too bad the world may work differently and you may have serious issues in your life but that's irrelevant.

[piotrj3]

You are lying. And reddit to my eyes is not a legitimate place to discuss issues. It is known that plenty of Nvidia fanboys/trolls visit AMD's reddit regularly to spread FUD. Due to my profession i have worked on countless systems from all manufacturers and know all too well if Nvidia has good drivers or not. I don't need others' opinions when i can have my own.

I am not AMD GPU user, but RDNA1 had so many crashes that even reviewers like GamersNexus or HardwareUnboxed (that is btw. mostly supporting AMD and is usually harsh on Nvidia if you remember reviewer fiasco) complained about them. As much as birdie likes to fly high, he is correct there. Nvidia also isn't perfectly stable but generally simple troubleshooting like reinstalling drivers almost always helped, meanwhile there are cases with AMD cards when on game graphs reviewers reported "0 fps" as they didn't work and I genuinly don't remember it for Nvidia. And lmao at you, AMD has waaay more fanboys then Nvidia ever had, literally der8auer and many others talked publicly about that fanboyism is horrible, and being a fanboy of any company is literally allowing that company to scalp you more. Nvidia has like 70%+ of dedicated GPU market and still i seen way more comments about that I have AMD card and something is broken. At least I am glad AMD improved things a lot.

Also Nvidia doesn't cripple performance of AMD, way of Nvidia is to create technologies that they usually create custom hardware for and that AMD lags with adaptation of those features. First was tesselation where Nvidia had much higher performance and everytime there was high complexity tesselation AMD lost tons of FPS, now it is like that with Raytracing. I remember when someone outraged commented in the past about Witcher 3 losing performance on AMD hardware due to gameworks, meanwhile GTX 1060 vs RX580 performed exactly inline as other game titles from similar times like Doom (2016). Nowadays it is mostly over way around, that when AMD sponsores game title it ends up being with 1/4th of raytracing resolution and only shadows (what let's be honest is not noticable vs non-raytraced image in most games) at best, also often avoiding touching technologies like DLSS.
Also if you talk about 10% performance flactuations on game to game basis, you can find on GamersNexus that AMD has those 10% fluctuations up and down between own cards, like sometimes RX6600 is 10% faster then 5600XT, but in some cases it is actually even slower. The same 10% sometimes max 20% occurs between AMD and Nvidia and that is completly understandable as they use totally not similar hardware, drivers and often even totally diffrent design choices.

[Nocifer]

The only person lying through their teeth here is you and the whole brainwashed Linux "community" cocksuckers who are so high on FOSS cum they actually believe AMD makes better drivers than Nvidia.

Any sane Windows user with an hour's of experience with either driver knows and swears by Nvidia's driver quality. Hell, even the proprietary Nvidia driver on Linux has consistently given both AMD's open and proprietary drivers the middle finger in performance and stability.

I smell a ban incoming. Or you could have some dignity and GTFO yourself.

Well yes, but dare I say: games already often run better than on Windows for various reasons. Be it controller support, being able to launch at all, frames per second... about the latter, there are people using DXVK on Windows by copying a file in each game's folder! So primitive, right?
Meanwhile, I'm about to finish Yakuza 0, a splendid game that Windows users report can't even save properly.
Let's hope KDE is in good enough shape by the time the Deck reaches users' hands. Cheers.

Hey buddy, you're preaching to the choir here :P I'm a long-time gamer gaming exclusively on Linux nowadays and I refuse to install Windows just to be able to squeeze 10fps more out of my system or run the rare exception that won't run properly on Linux (mainly online competitive games and some weird cases like the recent Pathfinder game). If and when (hopefully the latter, go go Steam Deck) the last remaining compatibility hurdles go away (anti-cheat and WMF support mainly) there's going to be less than zero reasons for a gamer to run Windows anymore, unless they care about the aforementioned extra fps (personally I couldn't give a rat's a$$).

Edit to add, there's also some other stuff that Windows gamers enjoy which have no equivalent in Linux, such as Nvidia Shadowplay etc (that's what I actually had in mind when I wrote about support in my previous comment), and which can make a gamer wish to remain on Windows even after anti-cheat and WMF support is tackled. But these are also things that I don't personally care about. Not to mention that Nvidia may yet decide to offer support for them in the near future.

[ssokolow]

Support with Plasma 5.24 to fix the regression of being able to change the desktop resolution when running in a virtual machine.

Is this saying they regressed my "Use the guest OS's display control panel to snap the VM window to a specific size after accidentally resizing it" use-case?

- Can't click-drag-release on menus anymore

OK, that's a deal-breaker. I've always thought the Linux-ism of being able to use Windows-style (click-move-click) or Mac-style (click-drag-release) menu interactions just by whether the button is held down when you start to move the mouse was genius and I'm not giving it up.

It's bad enough that it took them so long to re-implement the SELECTION clipboard years ago.

[birdie]

Don't the Linux community love to preach about ethics? Apparently lying through one's teeth and spreading misinformation counts as ethics nowadays.

When you waste countless hours trying to make Linux work many people gain Stockholm syndrome only they don't realize that. Considering I've spent probably twenty times as many hours as any user here I should have gained it as well only I haven't. There must be something wrong with me. I just want Linux to be stabler, and more user-friendly, that's it.

Another possible explanation is probably tribalism and elitism. When the OS is used by fewer than 2% of people in the world, you kinda start feeling superior about your choice and start painting black everything and everyone who hasn't joined your tribe, including companies. Again, hasn't happened to me for some reasons.

[birdie]

OK, that's a deal-breaker. I've always thought the Linux-ism of being able to use Windows-style (click-move-click) or Mac-style (click-drag-release) menu interactions just by whether the button is held down when you start to move the mouse was genius and I'm not giving it up.

It's bad enough that it took them so long to re-implement the SELECTION clipboard years ago.

I really don't understand how people prefer click-drag-release - it sounds and feels overly complicated and more prone to errors as you need to drag your mouse while pushing it down. Tastes differ however, so let it be.

[ssokolow]

I really don't understand how people prefer click-drag-release - it sounds and feels overly complicated and more prone to errors as you need to drag your mouse while pushing it down. Tastes differ however, so let it be.

It's actually simpler to coordinate once you get used to it, for the same reason that it's easier to type an all-lowercase command name. Press-release-move-press-release is inherently a more complicated motion than press-move-release and those added steps require precision.

At the same time, I like having the freedom to choose based on the situation.

As for being more prone to errors, I wonder if maybe we prefer different kinds of mice. With mine, I habitually grip the mouse body in a way which makes it easy to keep the motion of my hand as a whole and the motion of my button-pressing fingers isolated from each other.

Heck, Linux actually made me appreciate the Mac style. I came from Windows and having it so easy to do either made me slowly slip into the habit of doing it the Mac way without realizing it, because it was faster and simpler when I was zipping through some familiar task.

Now, I use the Windows way when I know I'm going to need to stop and inspect the menu, and the Mac way when it's more a muscle memory thing.