KDE Plasma 6.0 Is Proving To Be Unlike The Rocky KDE 4 Launch

[MorrisS.]

I just switched from X11 to Wayland yesterday in EndeavourOS+KDE Plasma. And pipewire seems to be working fine.

$ ps -e | grep pipewire
1331 ? 00:00:00 pipewire
1436 ? 00:00:00 pipewire-pulse​

I get the same result under Xorg session.... use pactl info command by terminal to have a more reliable result.

[DarkFoss]

I'm planning on upgrading from 22.04.4 lts to 24.04 when it's released. Once Neon re-bases to it and HDR is in I'll migrate most likely in the fall.

[bug77]

Word of caution, Arch is a bit weird about this. At first, KDE6 was offered in kde-unstable repo. The day KDE6 released, that repo was apparently emptied adn KDE6 moved to extra-testing (pacman would simply complain the installed packages are newer than what it could find in the repos). Commenting out kde-unstable and uncommenting extras-testing does the trick. I expect the same thing will happen when it moves from extra-testing to extra.
Everything works fine. Save for a kernel bug that popped up in extra-testing on Friday (I think) and was resolved today.

(NB This is not a critique. Just a heads-up for those that, like, would get caught off-guard by these moves.)

Edit: That mouse cursor going away sure seems sweet. No more having to park it at the edge of the screen to get it out of sight.

[hf_139]

I am not going to argue with what you want. How can I? You stated your desires, best of luck to you.

Sad, i wanted to launch a flameware with a 100+ posts discussion about whether or not desktop effects are good.

But good for you, i also wish you best of luck.

[bearoso]

With kwin v6 on X11 the compositor is skipping a lot of frames with my usual 120hz mode. Set it to 144hz and it behaves, but I never had a problem with kwin 5. The likely cause is the removal of the smooth vs low latency setting in favor of a heuristic which isn't tuned properly.

I'm also seeing some spacing issues with high dpi. The cause is obvious again, being the change to fixed values for spacing instead of being based on the font size.

It's clearly not ready for me yet, so I rolled back to Plasma 5.

I don't think Wayland compositing has the same performance penalty compiz had on xorg. With compiz it had a lot of back and forth between xserver, the compositor, the app, etc. With wayland it is more straightforward. But yeah, since Wayland pretty much requires 3d acceleration and is running compositing all the time, why not add some eye candy?

Compiz is ancient code, based on David Reveman's original xgl compositor. Nowadays, with modern compositors and things like dmabuf and DRI3, there's a lot of sharing going on. So copying is minimal and performance is optimal.

[byteabit]

With kwin v6 on X11 the compositor is skipping a lot of frames with my usual 120hz mode. Set it to 144hz and it behaves, but I never had a problem with kwin 5. The likely cause is the removal of the smooth vs low latency setting in favor of a heuristic which isn't tuned properly.

Glad I switched to Wayland finally (assuming its not affected), because I do use 120Hz on 144Hz monitor too. How do you notice the skipping? Do you mean you get tearing while just watching a video in example? You can change a setting in Plasma, that is related to this and my solve the issue for you: open KDE Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor . There is a checkbox "`[ ]` Reduce latency by allowing screen tearing artifacts in fullscreen windows" and a dropdown menu "Latency:" with lowest setting "Force lowest latency (may cause dropped frames)". Maybe have a look there if it solves the issue you got.

[Daktyl198]

Even 6.1 development build is usable now. But what worries me is those "unnecessary-to-me" eye candy features like 3D Cube effects creeping in and reducing the resource efficiency and performance. I hope this is not a trend that will continue. Anyway, that development cycle and release quality was a smashing success. Way to go!

Most, if not all, of the "unnecessary" eye candy features are plugins/scripts for KWin and can be disabled in the settings so they don't run. I turn pretty much all of them off immediately.

[bearoso]

Glad I switched to Wayland finally (assuming its not affected), because I do use 120Hz on 144Hz monitor too. How do you notice the skipping? Do you mean you get tearing while just watching a video in example? You can change a setting in Plasma, that is related to this and my solve the issue for you: open KDE Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor . There is a checkbox "`[ ]` Reduce latency by allowing screen tearing artifacts in fullscreen windows" and a dropdown menu "Latency:" with lowest setting "Force lowest latency (may cause dropped frames)". Maybe have a look there if it solves the issue you got.

No tearing, since it's vsynced. Everything just runs at 60 frames per second instead of 120, except the mouse cursor which is perfectly smooth.

The latency setting you mention is the same one I was talking about that was removed. I'm guessing the heuristic that replaced it is overestimating the time to wait before swapping and missing the vblank interval.

[kiffmet]

I tried it out on my Gentoo box, but reverted to an earlier filesystem snapshot soon after. 1.25x (my display has 123DPI and thus needs 1.28125x but that's not offered as an option) scaling still causes all fonts to become blurry, and the option to manually set a fontDPI (which has worked flawlessly without blur, size mismatches or artifacting for all these years) got removed. This got me quite irritated as Plasma6 has been explicitly stated to finally fix fractional scaling…

Latte-dock simply refuses to launch on Plasma6 and many of the addons and plasmoids I'm using won't ever get ported since half of them are unmaintined now. So yeah, unfortunately it's been quite disappointing. Ima stay on 5.27 as long as I can now.

[bug77]

I tried it out on my Gentoo box, but reverted to an earlier filesystem snapshot soon after. 125% scaling still causes all fonts to become blurry, and the option to manually set a fontDPI (which has worked flawlessly without blur, size mismatches or artifacting) got removed. This got me quite irritated as Plasma6 has been explicitly stated to finally fix fractional scaling…

Fractional scaling has been fine since beta. You may want to have a word with your freetype config, if fonts don't look right on your install. I was also irked by the removal of font dpi. but after reading some more about how fractional scaling works, I realized it was mostly duplicated functionality. Needed for X (where it is still available), of course, but Wayland can do without it.