KDE Plasma 5.19 Rolls Out In Beta Form With Many Improvements, Better Wayland Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.19 Rolls Out In Beta Form With Many Improvements, Better Wayland Support

The KDE community has released the first beta of the forthcoming Plasma 5.19 desktop release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Plasma-5.19-Beta

[TemplarGR]

It is nice that KDE devs pay attention to Wayland. They have a lot of catching up to do, Wayland is important.

[zexelon]

It is nice that KDE devs pay attention to Wayland. They have a lot of catching up to do, Wayland is important.

Still not sure why wayland is important... other than stripping the client/server aspect of Xorg it just seems like a re-write for the sake of re-write... but in the interest of full disclosure I have only looked at it from the outside. Mostly because KDE and Nvidia were not supported on it.

[treba]

Still not sure why wayland is important... other than stripping the client/server aspect of Xorg it just seems like a re-write for the sake of re-write... but in the interest of full disclosure I have only looked at it from the outside. Mostly because KDE and Nvidia were not supported on it.

Because a bunch of things people want to do are really hard or outright impossible to do on X11 - which is why on Android you have surface finger and Canonical started Mir for their phone plans. In the embedded space, e.g. the car industry, Wayland is already widely used etc. The current situation is kinda unfortunate because WMs/compostiors, toolkits and apps that do not only rely on toolkits need to support both, which is quite an overhead. So the sooner everyone migrates to Wayland, the less duplicated work has to be done :/

[zexelon]

treba Very interesting, they seem to have a hate on for Nvidia so unfortunately its a bit of a deal breaker. Yah, duplicated effort is quite pervasive in the Linux echo system, but its to be expected in anything as open as OSS.

[Baguy]

treba Very interesting, they seem to have a hate on for Nvidia so unfortunately its a bit of a deal breaker. Yah, duplicated effort is quite pervasive in the Linux echo system, but its to be expected in anything as open as OSS.

Wayland doesn't hate Nvidia. Nvidia hates Wayland, or at least it seems, considering they went their own route rather than following the standard that everyone else adopted and don't give a crap about keeping it maintained and fixing bugs in it. That is why Nvidia support in Wayland is so bad.

While the Wayland developers, Intel, and AMD went with a graphics buffer API called GBM, Nvidia decided to go off and do their own thing with something called EGLStreams. Further, while they did patch Gnome and Plasma to run on Nvidia cards with EGLStreams, they never fixed alot of the major bugs that basically make it completely broken.... And because their drivers are propeitary, there is no way for open source developers to fix those issues themselves, beyond hacky patches in the window managers, which is not good practice as it can cause further issues and dirty code.

Further, due to all that, Sway for example doesn't support Nvidia cards anymore. And even in Xorg you will find performance issues on desktops, quirky bugs, and hacky code patches (specifically in Gnome and Kwin-lowlatency... The developers of Plasma Kwin generally don't accept hardware specific hack jobs) made to try and remedy the Nvidia graphics driver bugs.

So yeah, Nvidia cards are powerful... And can be great value at times... But nvidia really doesn't seem to give a crap about doing things right. AMD and Intel have put alot of work into their Open source drivers and software.

[Luke_Wolf]

Still not sure why wayland is important... other than stripping the client/server aspect of Xorg it just seems like a re-write for the sake of re-write... but in the interest of full disclosure I have only looked at it from the outside. Mostly because KDE and Nvidia were not supported on it.

If you don't know the purpose and benefits of wayland at this point you must have been living under a rock, but the short version is that not only is Xorg an unmaintainable pile of garbage code that few understand and fewer want to touch, but it also doesn't work with the way that modern toolkits and desktops are written because it's not designed for how "modern" hardware (anything in the last 20+ years) works. Additionally there's a whole host of security oversights like how trivial it is to write a keylogger in Xorg. Wayland, and a bunch of additional protocols that saying Wayland implies aims to fix all that.

If you want the specifics just search on this forum for "Wayland" and then look at the threads from 5 years ago.

[Baguy]

I'm really looking forward to Plasma 5.20 now! I can't wait to see what gets added for Wayland, and how the rest of UI improvements turn out!

Also... Now that Sway has got AMD Freesync Support in Wayland, I'd love to see Plasma gain support for that.

[mdedetrich]

Because a bunch of things people want to do are really hard or outright impossible to do on X11 - which is why on Android you have surface finger and Canonical started Mir for their phone plans. In the embedded space, e.g. the car industry, Wayland is already widely used etc. The current situation is kinda unfortunate because WMs/compostiors, toolkits and apps that do not only rely on toolkits need to support both, which is quite an overhead. So the sooner everyone migrates to Wayland, the less duplicated work has to be done :/

Easier said then done, certain applications like Wine are fundamentally incompatible with Wayland, its going to take time to resolve these issues.

[dragon321]

Still not sure why wayland is important... other than stripping the client/server aspect of Xorg it just seems like a re-write for the sake of re-write... but in the interest of full disclosure I have only looked at it from the outside. Mostly because KDE and Nvidia were not supported on it.

Of course, better security, no flickering or tearing, better HiDPI or multi screen support is nothing. Some 80's display protocol will be fine here and we don't need anything.

Yes, Wayland isn't ideal on terms of features but has strong advantages and calling it "rewrite for the sake of rewrite" isn't correct. Guess why Linux based operating systems like Android, ChromeOS or Sailfish OS don't use Xorg at all.