KDE Plasma 5.25's Exciting Improvements For KWin, Continued Wayland Optimizations

[RejectModernity]

I find KWinFT based on wlroots a lot more promising: https://subdiff.org/blog/2020/the-kwinft-project/

Very cool project indeed, but I read Roman has some financial issues for it and now he can't spend all his time on it. Man's gotta eat you know. So development slowed down.

[MadeUpName]

Fedora is dropping real X in the next release. Any chance that is going to work for the KDE spin or are we still stuck waiting for SDDM to be upgraded?

[Charlie68]

I have tried KwinFT several times and I could use it if it worked better than Kwin, but at the moment it is not and I am happy to see that Kwin is getting a lot of attention and development.
I am using Plasma 5.24 with Kwin and have never had any problems until now, so I am quite satisfied, I have not started a Plasma session on Xorg with 5.24 yet.
This does not mean that everything is perfect, so I am happy to see new improvements and it is also nice and reassuring to read that the devs themselves admit some mistakes made in the past.

[chuckula]

I find KWinFT based on wlroots a lot more promising: https://subdiff.org/blog/2020/the-kwinft-project/

I've tried to install it from the AUR in Arch on multiple occasions and it always bombs out with a build error so I can't even see if it's any good.

[bple2137]

Plasma 5.24 is the first release I see the Wayland session as something more than a tech preview. I've been daily driving it since it was released and there are no deal breakers on my end. It hasn't crashed even once, everything I need is in place, it's stable, smooth and my laptop is cooler and quieter compared to X session. I really like how it progressed recently.

The only missing feature I ever wanted to have in Plasma is coming in 5.25 and it's desktop switching using 1:1 touchpad gesture in the proper direction. Even if it wasn't 1:1, I asked the devs about changing the direction about 2 years ago, and they tried to convince me it's the correct way as it was... I used X11 with libinput-gestures anyway.

[spstarr]

Fedora is dropping real X in the next release. Any chance that is going to work for the KDE spin or are we still stuck waiting for SDDM to be upgraded?

Fedora is not dropping X anywhere. Never mind Wayland and NVidia just don't play well enough to even move to Wayland yet...

[dragon321]

Fedora is dropping real X in the next release.

Fedora plans to drop legacy X.Org drivers in next release, not X itself.

[yump]

KwinFT "complete rewrite everything as big bang" is not desirable: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/...ver-do-part-i/

The fact that that was written over 20 years ago and people are *still* using words like "outdated" and "modern" in reference to software makes me despair for the future of humanity.

If solved problems don't stay (or aren't left) solved, maintenance and rewrites grow to consume an ever-increasing share of programmer effort.

[Toggleton]

I've tried to install it from the AUR in Arch on multiple occasions and it always bombs out with a build error so I can't even see if it's any good.

With all the kwinft named packages installed + wlroots and updated should the release 5.24 version build fine. Only the git version makes problems to build for me.

[archola]

Wayland on KDE 5.24 has been a pleasant experience for me. No more big crashes, most functionality is in place, very nice indeed. Now if only more apps jumped into Wayland...

I have just reverted back to X11 on Plasma/KWin yesterday, after accomplishing a wayland testing period of a whole day this time (woohoo, progress). This was my fifth attempt or so at switching to wayland while using KWin, but it's still not ready yet, even if it feels better with every new release.

What made me go back this time was a hard crash after a couple of hours working, caused by random popups in pycharm that KWin apparently didn't like. Fortunately I didn't lose any work. Then there's the lack of global hotkeys in certain applications which simply can't be ignored. Not to mention the issues with multi-monitor setups and default window positions. Even Plasma's own lock-screen can't decide which screen's the default one when entering the password without activating the right screen with the mouse first.

If everything was running reliably stable and the global app hotkey issues were solved, I wouldn't mind all the other minor issues, because there are a ton more issues/bugs in KWin's X11 implementation, especially those introduced by recent wayland infrastructure changes. Unfortunately those bugs don't receive the right amount of attention anymore, so this has been making me more curious about the current state of wayland in KWin recently.