KDE Plasma 5.19 Has Better Wayland Support But Their Goal Is Not Yet Complete

Shipping one week from today is KDE Plasma 5.19 and among many other improvements is also significantly enhancing its Wayland support.

KDE developer Méven Car penned a blog post today outlining some of the Wayland-minded improvements to be found in Plasma 5.19. Among that Plasma 5.19 + Wayland work includes:

- Subsurface clipping is one of the big additions.

- Support for the Wayland Tablet Protocol for tablet touch and pen pressure, among related capabilities.

- Resizing of XWayland windows is now smoother and similar to that of running the X11 session. But X.Org Server 1.21 is really needed for the best experience and there still are no signs of that release on the horizon.

- The KWayland library has been split into client and server portions.

- Plasma's global application menu is now working on Wayland.

- The Plasma task manager can now bring forward multiple windows of the same program and preserves their stacking order.

- KRunner is better positioned.

- The KScreen on-screen display is now usable on Wayland.

- Multiple KWin crash fixes resolved.

But Méven noted in his blog post, "Our goal is in part to make Plasma run in Wayland by default allowing pixel perfection, real security in the display server, better performance and overall better architecture. The road is still long to reach feature parity with the venerable X based sessions. So we need as much people to help whether it is for testing, hacking code or reporting bugs."