KDE Reduces CPU Usage On Wayland When Moving The Pointer & Other Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Reduces CPU Usage On Wayland When Moving The Pointer & Other Fixes

After a few weeks hiatus due to the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back in the saddle with his weekly development reports around KDE...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Fixes-Start-2024

[Sethox]

Will it become a point where Wayland news is not exciting anymore?

Either way, it caters to me..

[varikonniemi]

that mouse cursor bug was certainly unexpected to see this late in the development cycle. Maybe most people use HW cursor and this bug relates to soft cursor only?

[spicfoo]

Will it become a point where Wayland news is not exciting anymore?

I hope not, in the desktop space, things only become less exciting when it is maintenance mode with only minor bug/security fixes or abandoned entirely. As long as it is in active development there will always be exciting news as the tech around it evolves constantly. Things like VRR, VR, HDR, Speech recognition, mobile connectivity, accessibility, architectural changes (both software and hardware) and so forth come up all the time and user's expectations will continue to increase. We will never be "done"

[waxhead]

How can they call KDE "modern" if there is a busy wait going on?! ... I did like the compact KDE 2.0 and 3.0 releases, but I am glad I moved on to XFCE. For me a desktop environment should basically stay "out of my way" as much as possible.

Personally I use DoubleCommander for filemanagement, DeaDBeeF for music, Pidgin for chat/irc, Geequie for pictures, mpv (occasionally vlc) for video and sometimes the xfce filemanager for accessing files on my phone and the trusty xterm for terminal stuff. Is it really that much else that can (or should) be done?! Apart from this I imagine most people run programs such as blender, audacity, gimp, etc... etc.... so one might wonder , what the hell does a desktop environment busy wait for these days?

And just for the record... with busy wait I mean stuff like...
while(1) { if(event()) break;};

[Volta]

How can they call KDE "modern" if there is a busy wait going on?! ... I did like the compact KDE 2.0 and 3.0 releases, but I am glad I moved on to XFCE. For me a desktop environment should basically stay "out of my way" as much as possible.[...]

There was only one condition missing. This is not something that would disqualify it as modern. Unlike XFCE.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d4a3d6689ea2cd75427b3c3efedd654c6e38d30d

[ssokolow]

- Applying a wallpaper to all screens at once can now be easily/quickly done.

Is this just a convenience helper for duplicating the same settings to all monitors? Do I still need my PyQt5 script which reads the XRandR layout and then crops out pieces suitable for giving the illusion of spanning it across all three desktops?

(Because why wouldn't you use a single desktop-spanning image if you never change the shape of your desktop by adding/removing monitors? It really helps to drive home that it's one desktop spanning multiple physical devices. Stuff like this helps to give the strongest effect IMO.)

[skeevy420]

How can they call KDE "modern" if there is a busy wait going on?! ... I did like the compact KDE 2.0 and 3.0 releases, but I am glad I moved on to XFCE. For me a desktop environment should basically stay "out of my way" as much as possible.

Personally I use DoubleCommander for filemanagement, DeaDBeeF for music, Pidgin for chat/irc, Geequie for pictures, mpv (occasionally vlc) for video and sometimes the xfce filemanager for accessing files on my phone and the trusty xterm for terminal stuff. Is it really that much else that can (or should) be done?! Apart from this I imagine most people run programs such as blender, audacity, gimp, etc... etc.... so one might wonder , what the hell does a desktop environment busy wait for these days?

And just for the record... with busy wait I mean stuff like...
while(1) { if(event()) break;};

I dunno, the same way they call GNOME modern when it needs VSync to hit 60hz on low end hardware?

I used to do that exact same thing with XFCE until this one day I realized that the majority of programs I ran used Qt...including the window manager because XFCE+KWin was the shit...ask me what I miss about X11 desktop environments...so one day, over a decade ago, I did a bunch of fresh installs with Arch one after the other and saw that all the desktops were within 100mb of memory usage of each other, except for GNOME which used 300mb more than anything else, so I've been using KDE ever since.

I kind of want to do all those installs again just to see what is and isn't lightweight by default.

Comprehensive set of programs, offers as many settings and user freedoms as possible, it's as lightweight as environments that aim to be lightweight, and they try their damnedest to implement all the latest community standards in ways that the community likes instead of telling 'em to do it in a special manner just for KDE. I feel like I have to nit-pick KDE or compare it to other environments to find issues, seemingly better ways to do things, or new features to get...like all the files under ./config, window snapping once you get used to Windows 11 FancyZones from PowerToys (highly customizable window snapping), and File Locksmith from PowerToys (it's a right click Explorer option that tells you what processes are using/accessing the file or folder you're checking).

That's unlike their competitor where the shortcomings are things like "Where's the damn start menu? It's full screen like Android? WTF man?!?" or "Dammit, those four things were supposed to minimize to a system tray. I guess I gotta put all my system tray programs on their own desktop. That isn't user friendly." or "It's just terrific only using 60hz of my 144hz monitor." and then if you complain about that you're told to install some plugin from xX_Egdelord69_Xx or to compile programs from source with patches like compiling from source what regular people, non techies, do. Sorry not sorry, but I'm not Canonical so I don't want my setup to depend on some plugins from xX_Egdelord69_Xx or 3 year old merge requests that aren't being pulled in because GNOME apparently likes their users to suffer. Been there, used plugins, up...dated, got wrecked, never again.

[ezst036]

GNOME recently completed moving mouse cursor-movement onto its own dedicated thread.

Does KDE currently operate this way as well with a dedicated thread?

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-40-Separate-Input-Thread

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-KMS-Thread

[geearf]

that mouse cursor bug was certainly unexpected to see this late in the development cycle. Maybe most people use HW cursor and this bug relates to soft cursor only?

I'm the one that opened the bug, though others have felt the issue as well. So far of all people that mentioned their distro, it was pure Arch, so with Qt6.7 which is not targeted by KDE for now. That could be the reason, or not, I have not looked at the fix yet, nor if it actually is a fix.
I don't know what you mean by HW/SW cursor but I'm happy to try.