Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State: "It's Still Rough, But It's Usable"

[Nth_man]

Plasma 6 is a work in progress, not a finished product. What to expect?

Plasma 5 works fine, in fact I'm writing this using it (under X11). Anyone can see it for himself using a Kubuntu virtual machine: https://www.linuxvmimages.com/images/kubuntu-2204

[eagleoneraptor]

I tried KDE a bunch of times because problems I've got in GNOME in terms of performance (largely fixed now). I just can't get used to the lack of attention to detail in terms of usability and design, it's like "let's put a shit ton of tiny widgets and hope for the best".

[codewiz]

Plasma 5 is pretty broken. Hopefully they fix a lot of the common issues:

Clipboard sometimes refuses to work across apps, despite trying all the clipboard settings.

Dragging files into the browser often don't work, which works in Windows. Ark also doesn't support opening files directly from the window or dragging out into a file manager. I end up using lxqt archiver.

There's a bunch of others, especially on Wayland.

Are you sure you're using the latest release of Plasma? I've seen all these bugs, and they've been fixed long ago.

[Barnacle]

Plasma 6 is a work in progress, not a finished product. What to expect?

Plasma 5 works fine, in fact I'm writing this using it (under X11). Anyone can see it for himself using a Kubuntu virtual machine: https://www.linuxvmimages.com/images/kubuntu-2204

Exactly. Wayland is a dumpster fire on all DEs, even Gnome. The people complaining about KDE are probably the "herp, derp, I'm pro-future and anti-past, so I refuse to try a DE using X11" crowd. Some of the earlier releases of Plasma 5 were a mixed bag, but it's been solid for years under X11.

[openminded]

I tried KDE a bunch of times because problems I've got in GNOME in terms of performance (largely fixed now). I just can't get used to the lack of attention to detail in terms of usability and design, it's like "let's put a shit ton of tiny widgets and hope for the best".

Well I'd better choose the lack of attention to details (Plasma, probably) instead of no details at all (Gnome).

[Sethox]

Exactly. Wayland is a dumpster fire on all DEs, even Gnome. The people complaining about KDE are probably the "herp, derp, I'm pro-future and anti-past, so I refuse to try a DE using X11" crowd. Some of the earlier releases of Plasma 5 were a mixed bag, but it's been solid for years under X11.

If someone gatekeeps you from using X11, that's on them but Wayland is the modern Desktop Environment we need in terms of security while X11 is the Desktop Environment that works with security flaws and in a constant maintenance mode. None of this is bad, just one progresses forward (in a very slow pace apparently, I blame it on structure to use the resources on the project) and the other is ironically just a feature complete because it was created for another period of time.

I hate Gnome and their stupid choices, but Gnome Wayland works out of the gate. Would I say Gnome Wayland is flawless, never, it's just good enough for using and web browsing and for everything else you have to research a little to find out if it works or not... like a good user would have regardless.

[mrg666]

Wayland is not a dumpster fire anymore. Works great on Ubuntu 23.04, Plasma 5.27.4, AMD rx6800 xt, 4k resolution 1.25 scaling. Everything works as good as windows 11. X11 is just XWayland compatibility layer for me which I am looking forward to eliminate after Steam, Gimp, and few others make the change.

I had a lot of problems when I had an Nvidia card. AMD drivers are open source and fully integrated with everything in Linux kernel, Wayland, Mesa. Recently when AMD released some buggy drivers on Windows that caused problems, Linux driver was still working great.

Anyway, back to the topic. Looking forward to try Plasma 6

[skeevy420]

Wayland is not a dumpster fire anymore. Works great on Ubuntu 23.04, Plasma 5.27.4, AMD rx6800 xt, 4k resolution 1.25 scaling. Everything works as good as windows 11. X11 is just XWayland compatibility layer for me which I am looking forward to eliminate after Steam, Gimp, and few others make the change.

I had a lot of problems when I had an Nvidia card. AMD drivers are open source and fully integrated with everything in Linux kernel, Wayland, Mesa. Recently when AMD released some buggy drivers on Windows that caused problems, Linux driver was still working great.

Anyway, back to the topic. Looking forward to try Plasma 6

As an end-user, the only thing dumpster fire about Wayland is Weston. They really, really need to get rid of that and switch over to wlroots. I only say that because it seems like practically every open source project is either based on wlroots or does their own thing. AFAIK, only Weston uses Weston/libweston.

Damn near every complaint about Wayland after Weston, that I see at least, is usually in regards to the issues that arise when switching a massive codebase from X to W. AKA, Plasma and GNOME users.

Ditto on looking forward to Plasma 6.

[mrg666]

As an end-user, the only thing dumpster fire about Wayland is Weston.

Weston is not used in Plasma. KDE has a very (if not the most) advanced Wayland compositor (Kwin) fortunately.

[oiaohm]

As an end-user, the only thing dumpster fire about Wayland is Weston. They really, really need to get rid of that and switch over to wlroots. I only say that because it seems like practically every open source project is either based on wlroots or does their own thing. AFAIK, only Weston uses Weston/libweston.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/a-libweston-based-compositor-for-automotive-grade-linux.html

There are some very heavily used compositors based on libweston. Agl compositor used in lots of cars big one. There is another for aircraft controls. Items needing high certification. wlroots has some issues in those areas the design of it code base makes it harder to validate to required standards. Please note areas where libweston based compositors are used the little bits of missing functionality don't matter but the means to audit the code base is absolutely critical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Wayland

Yes the libwayland using compositors don't appear here.

There are a few things important. Weston/libweston only implement what is in the Wayland standards because they are the reference implementation. wlroots implements stuff outside the reference implementation. So bad news bares really wlroots cannot replace libweston and wlroots took on the restriction of only implement what is in the Wayland protocol and standard recommend parts there are going to be things missing.

The use cases of libweston kind wonders if it should be rewritten in nim/rust/zig in future to make the item even simpler to audit. Implementing features outside the specifications does equal implementing items that have not been though a full peer review process it work out if it a good idea this comes a big problem for using wlroots in particular fields.

skeevy420 yes there is more than the libweston out there there is the Qt library based compositor camp as well also more often found in the embedded space. libweston if doing C based qt based if doing C++ base both are restrictive to only have parts that are in Wayland protocol as standards.

KDE, Gnome and sway/wlroots all three implement protocols that are not part of standard yet to test out if what they are thinking is anywhere near workable/some what safe.


Lot of ways weston being the reference compositor it should be the worst case. If Wayland compositor alternative to reference compositor is not equal/better than weston what the heck are they doing. Weston and libweston job is to be the min bar of quality that everything else in the Wayland space should be equal or better than.