KDE Lands More Plasma Wayland Improvements & Fixes Ahead Of Plasma 5.25

[bple2137]

I know, but it's still ahead of KDE Wayland session. For example, Firefox with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 on Gnome Wayland worked well for me, but some still say it's unusable on Plasma Wayland.

I use it daily and it's better than on X11. It works just as well as it did in GNOME.

[krzyzowiec]

Yeah, it seems to me they really care a lot about their code quality (avoid hacks as much as possible) which lead to decisions like removing desktop icons and tray icons. Before I tried Gnome, I didn't really like these decisions, but then I understood that this approach is the reason Gnome is so stable, even on Wayland.

Same here. I actually have to give them credit for changing my views on it. I used to think desktop icons were important, but now I find I prefer managing everything through the file manager and app launcher. Now there is one less thing for me to manage, where before I would micro manage desktop icons because they were always in my face. They probably would have sold me on tray icons too if the UI support for Wireguard was better, but for now it's not great, so I'm using an app/tray icon for my VPN.

[xerom62]

You know what? not long ago I had a low opinion about Wayland in general. But when I've used Gnome 40 Wayland (on Fedora 34) a few months ago, it was one of the most rock solid Linux desktop experiences ever since I started using Linux. Not a single crash. And wayy more stable than KDE (yes, even on x11). KDE seems to be the only DE where you have these ridiculous bugs like when you customize your panel, plasma shell crashes if you move your cursor "in a certain way", or when you turn your monitor off and then on, Plasma desktop crashes. Issues like these make me think the whole KDE codebase needs some major code refactoring, otherwise bugs like these will keep creeping in again and again.

A broken plasmoid widget can cause the whole plasma shell to crash. As opposed to just the widget dying on its own. If the widget crashes on start then you're in for a really fun time.

QML has serious dragons lurking about. For instance you really shouldn't size a child component by referencing directly the parent size. Don't do it. It may seem reasonable way to fit UI element to its container. Though nobody will tell you this unless you read it on some subcomment buried in random stack overflow question that says, maybe don't do that.

[Nth_man]

I use it daily and it's better than on X11. It works just as well as it did in GNOME.

Also, it's not limiting you . For example, Qt / KDE dialogs allow you to rename files and folders (using the right mouse button), or delete them. They have more features.

[ngraham]

Some nice bug fixes for Wayland, great! I'm sure Plasma 5.25 will be a stable & good release. I hope that it allows my Steam Deck to switch to Plasma Wayland as well.

One annoyance is the small size of the default start menu of Plasma. I really dislike the scroll bars that appear as soon as there are some additional categories. Why is it not possible to change the size? :-(

It will be in Plasma 5.25!

[joshx1]

Gotta love announcement threads, brings out all the "X is better than this" people, same as systemd...

Plasma is pretty good, I use it with a Radeon card with Wayland on Arch on 1440p/165hz and it works pretty good for my usecase.

I'm always up for trying new DEs, so given the discussion here I'll give GNOME a spin.

I love the amount of work that goes into DEs, because it gives us CHOICE of what we want to use.

[direc85]

One upon a time in 2020, I rolled the dice and it landed on Gnome (on Wayland/AMD). I really don't have a lot to complain about (except some truly mind-boggling default options). I gave KDE a spin in a VM a few weeks back, and it crashed a _lot_ on me. It really seems KDE is collapsing under its own complexicity, and I wish it would not... It's a beautiful and fluent DE, and I welcome healthy competition! I woild like to use it as a daily driver to get proper experience, but I don't want to tinker needlessly anymore...

One thing I really, _really_ would like to see is similar blog posts regarding Gnome bugs. I almost refuse to believe that KDE is as crash prone as it is, it's in the "why my code works?" and "how did it ever work?" categories in my book! I have had a few crashes and hangs on Gnome/Wayland, but IIUC it's more on the DisplayPort + USB3.0 dock shenanigans than Gnome. Could very well be Wayland too.

QML has serious dragons lurking about. For instance you really shouldn't size a child component by referencing directly the parent size. Don't do it. It may seem reasonable way to fit UI element to its container. Though nobody will tell you this unless you read it on some subcomment buried in random stack overflow question that says, maybe don't do that.

As a hobbyist Sailfish OS app developer I can tell you that its QML makes heavy use of e.g. `parent.width` or `anchors.fill: parent`, both in the official and community apps. I would love to read both the reasoning why it is a bad idea, and an alternative method to achieve the same end result. Care to share some sources?

[Guest]

DEs running Wayland are nice and all, but where's all the programs that actually work natively with Wayland, or comparably to Xorg?

Steam has known performance issues on Wayland, ckb-next can't shut-off lights on Wayland, KeePassXC has varying levels of success with auto-type on Wayland (straight up doesn't work at all for me on F36), using xrandr to force non-native resolutions to wide or full aspect needs X, custom resolutions and refresh rates are worlds easier to set and test on Xorg, and Proton and Wine have varying levels of success too (I don't have a mouse cusros at all in D2R or City Car Driving with Wayland through both Wine Staging and Proton 7, Exp, and GE). And GNOME by itself can't restart the shell on Wayland sessions.

Basically, Firefox is the only thing I have that can use Wayland natively, and it doesn't gain anything (afaik) over X. Meanwhile, I have a list of other apps/games that work better still today on X.

[birdie]

DEs running Wayland are nice and all, but where's all the programs that actually work natively with Wayland, or comparably to Xorg?

Steam has known performance issues on Wayland, ckb-next can't shut-off lights on Wayland, KeePassXC has varying levels of success with auto-type on Wayland (straight up doesn't work at all for me on F36), using xrandr to force non-native resolutions to wide or full aspect needs X, custom resolutions and refresh rates are worlds easier to set and test on Xorg, and Proton and Wine have varying levels of success too (I don't have a mouse cusros at all in D2R or City Car Driving with Wayland through both Wine Staging and Proton 7, Exp, and GE). And GNOME by itself can't restart the shell on Wayland sessions.

Basically, Firefox is the only thing I have that can use Wayland natively, and it doesn't gain anything (afaik) over X. Meanwhile, I have a list of other apps/games that work better still today on X.

I don't know a single app which talks to Wayland directly except for the Weston terminal and I'm not even sure it's indeed the case.

[ResponseWriter]

As a long time KDE Plasma user (since KDE 4.5ish - before that on Gnome 2), I have to agree with some of the comments here. While KDE in general is great and has a good number of features, each release feels like a step forward and half step back. Admittedly, some issues aren't KDE issues (like Wayland windows disappearing if they receive too much input) but many are. With 5.24.5 it actually feels quite stable but I do still have an issue with my system requiring a hard reset because a window became fullscreen. It's happened since the 5.24 beta with mpv, gwenview, firefox, some game I was playing (possibly Subnautica in wine) while trying multiple kernels and Mesa versions.

I just hope 5.25 is finally the version I can provide to a family member who's been asking for a Linux system for months.