KDE Plasma 5.26 To Allow Crisper XWayland Apps With New Scaling Option

While this week marked the release of KDE Plasma 5.25, already there is a big shiny feature queued up for Plasma 5.26 to benefit those running the KDE Plasma Wayland session and relying on XWayland for X11 app compatibility.

In order to address XWayland apps looking blurry, Plasma 5.26 adds a new option to control the scaling of XWayland-based apps for X11 software running within the KDE Plasma software. Right now Plasma Wayland uses compositor-based scaling but can yield bluriness with that scaling on HiDPI displays. However, many existing X11 programs support X11 high DPI capabilities directly. So if your XWayland-using apps support high DPI scaling directly, this new KDE Plasma 5.26 option allows for that support to be used instead of the compositor-based scaling on HiDPI displays. In turn this should make those legacy apps much crisper when presented under the KDE Plasma Wayland session.

At the moment this new legacy X11 scaling option control is disabled by default but can be easily toggled with a new setting and after more widespread testing could become the new default.

KDE Plasma 5.26 will alos allow animated images to be used as wallpapers for the KDE desktop. This week KDE has also seen fixes for Plasma 5.25.1 to ensure external screens work properly with multi-GPU setups. There is also Dolphin file manager crash fixes, fixing a common KWin crash when the screen setup changes, fixing MPV video presentation under Plasma Wayland, and many other fixes queued up for Plasma 5.25.1 next month.

More details on all of the KDE changes to land this week -- during the Plasma 5.25 release week -- can be found via this blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham.