KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes In Its Easter Basket

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes In Its Easter Basket

This week saw KDE developers tackling many bug fixes to their open-source desktop software with Plasma Wayland fixes still being one of the dominant areas receiving bug fixing attention...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Fixes-Easter-2022

[Jedibeeftrix]

Great work as always, thank you.
As a thread hijack:
Does anyone know what has happened to SDDM 0.20?
Getting desperately close to a full wayland experience in KDE, but SDDM i believe remains a fly in the ointment...

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/milestone/13

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1471

[birdie]

Great work as always, thank you.
As a thread hijack:
Does anyone know what has happened to SDDM 0.20?
Getting desperately close to a full wayland experience in KDE, but SDDM i believe remains a fly in the ointment...

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/milestone/13

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1471

Donations are welcome.

[Zapp!]

The original sddm developer seems to be inactive and I heard that other involved KDE devs currently don't have enough time to fix the remaining issues with sddm on wayland.
Fedora 36 switched back to sddm on X11 by default because of this. Their initial plan was to ship with sddm on wayland by default, but it turned out to be too buggy. Apparently not even rootless X11 works with sddm, unfortunately.
I still use sddm with wayland on Fedora 36 and it works fine for me, but in general it doesn't seem to be ready.

[Jedibeeftrix]

The original sddm developer seems to be inactive and I heard that other involved KDE devs currently don't have enough time to fix the remaining issues with sddm on wayland.
Fedora 36 switched back to sddm on X11 by default because of this. Their initial plan was to ship with sddm on wayland by default, but it turned out to be too buggy. Apparently not even rootless X11 works with sddm, unfortunately.
I still use sddm with wayland on Fedora 36 and it works fine for me, but in general it doesn't seem to be ready.

thank you.

[qlum]

Some good improvements especially the krunner /yakuake always opening on the left monitor is a big reason not to use wayland for me.

[⤐⤐⤐⤐]

KDE problems:

Any module related to install artwork needs a fucking drop shadow effect just requiring hw acceleration to perform well even if you don't have actual hardware supporting it, making the scrolling to install icons, cursor, global themes excruciating slow. KDE needs badly a theme/artwork downloader/previewer without such requirement for Jesus Crist it's just to download and preview themes it'sn't an Eletronic Art game.

Still can't use dolphin or konqueror to change files ownership from one user to another using root account.

Dolphin can't open tab next to the current tab, dolphin don't remember from last session the corrrelation between in which workspace determinate window(s) was/were open.

Making icon theme for KDE require more work than one made for GNOME, can be that, but is.

Wireless connection management just crash constantly the shell, it needs an improved or somewhat separation or improved robustness, it is triggered by Firefox overloading dbus with its "Firefoness" mainly telephone home while stalling the OS, never happens with Chrome/Chromium.

I'm using Debian Stable and GNOME starts Wayland session without problem, KDE for other hand don't support Wayland without hardware acceleration and just crash/don't open.

For what I researched Dolphin can't have background tab theming color just to itself in separate, it's really antitheming cause coloring the background tabs with an independent color from other adjacent elements is an necessity to produce good looking dark themes, current dark Breeze theme actually isn't really dark with all that waterwashed "enriched "black" (black=grayish) color tones", for darker theme appreciators dark Breeze is dirty gray and not pleasant dark, it needs more constrastive bright/light hinting elements too, like separators, outlining of adjacent area pertaining to an element, etc.

[caligula]

The original sddm developer seems to be inactive and I heard that other involved KDE devs currently don't have enough time to fix the remaining issues with sddm on wayland.
Fedora 36 switched back to sddm on X11 by default because of this. Their initial plan was to ship with sddm on wayland by default, but it turned out to be too buggy. Apparently not even rootless X11 works with sddm, unfortunately.
I still use sddm with wayland on Fedora 36 and it works fine for me, but in general it doesn't seem to be ready.

Sounds pretty bad tbh. Last release almost two years ago. Few one-liners here there, some reverted. The devs seem to have no clue on how to solve things.

Are there any alternatives? GDM? I can't believe there are no C++/Qt alternatives for KDE/Wayland.

[polarathene]

Any module related to install artwork needs a fucking drop shadow effect just requiring hw acceleration to perform well even if you don't have actual hardware supporting it, making the scrolling to install icons, cursor, global themes excruciating slow. KDE needs badly a theme/artwork downloader/previewer without such requirement for Jesus Crist it's just to download and preview themes it'sn't an Eletronic Art game.

I don't know how to reproduce what you're experiencing. I used a VM with llvmpipe as it's graphics (no 3D accel) and even disabled the compositor (no drop shadows), compositor or not, scrolling was absolutely fine, sounds like something wrong with your system?

Wireless connection management just crash constantly the shell, it needs an improved or somewhat separation or improved robustness, it is triggered by Firefox overloading dbus with its "Firefoness" mainly telephone home while stalling the OS, never happens with Chrome/Chromium.

Again, I don't have this problem. I use wifi and have used Firefox without experiencing this. I have noticed when using Chromium with many windows/tabs, notably youtube that the compositor seems to crash doing a compositor reset, but eventually it's worse and either the browser becomes unresponsive or the whole session (to the point that I can't even switch to a different TTY, so probably a kernel panic). I assume that's mostly due to nvidia proprietary graphics driver though.

I do recall someone noting Firefox at least would send massive amounts of data over DBUS, and that was causing other services to be disconnected from DBUS as a result breaking things. That data sent by firefox was pretty much every tab IIRC, thus the more tabs/windows you have open for Firefox the more likely that would be a problem...but that's more of a Firefox and usage pattern problem rather than fault of KDE?

Here's a relevant issue for dbus-broker regarding that:

https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/issues/284#issuecomment-1074128150

I'm using Debian Stable and GNOME starts Wayland session without problem, KDE for other hand don't support Wayland without hardware acceleration and just crash/don't open.

What's important is what versions you're using of Plasma and Frameworks AFAIK....which for Debian Stable is probably old? So of course the Wayland experience will be worse when there's been many large Wayland improvements in past year or so IIRC? Meanwhile it's been known that Gnome had better Wayland support around the same time, so it's not surprising of a comparison then is it?

You're on Plasma 5.20 release late 2020?:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plasma-desktop

That's the thing about "Stable", it doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs. I assume you know that though. There's a good chance many of your issues have been resolved or at least not as bad. I know that some are still in the works, like Polkit support for Dolphin to perform root actions, but those are actively being worked on.

For anything you're experiencing that doesn't have an existing bug report, you should probably raise those if you actually care enough about them, or chime in on the existing one. It may help, but if it's too niche it might never get any interaction (my usual experience when using their Bugzilla). But if you're happy with Gnome, then use that, no one forcing you to run KDE if it doesn't meet your needs

[polarathene]

Sounds pretty bad tbh. Last release almost two years ago. Few one-liners here there, some reverted. The devs seem to have no clue on how to solve things.

Are there any alternatives? GDM? I can't believe there are no C++/Qt alternatives for KDE/Wayland.

There was a recent discussion about this on r/kde actually, with some users suggesting switching to LightDM I think (might have been something else), as it was in a better and actively maintained state, with a common backend to support various frontends. Not sure if it was a drop-in replacement, but the opinion was there was no need to re-invent the wheel or try revive KDM or twist GDM to the needs of KDE.