KDE Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

As a wonderful Christmas gift to KDE Plasma users on Wayland, fractional scaling under Wayland has been successfully merged.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 added fractional scaling support with the new "wp-fractional-scale-v1" protocol. Various Wayland compositors including KDE's KWin had experimental code written against this spec while it was pending. Now that the spec is in the Wayland-Protocols archive with its late November release, KDE has merged its implementation. This KWin work has landed for Plasma 5.27 and the Qt support was also merged upstream. That Qt fractional scaling support is only for Qt 6 right now but is possible it might be back-ported to Qt 5.15 LTS.

As covered yesterday, KDE Plasma 5.27 is also bringing much improved multi-monitor support.

KDE developer Nate Graham has published his weekly development summary that outlines other enhancements to the KDE desktop and its applications. KDE Plasma Wayland also has an optional feature for snooping on key-presses made in native Wayland apps (such as for using Discord's push-to-talk feature), Discover landed a SteamOS back-end, Spectacle enhancements, and a wide variety of bug fixes. More details on the KDE improvements made this week via Nate's blog.