It looks like KDE Plasma is getting usable with Wayland!
This is my current testing environment for this blog post:
Operating System: EndeavourOS
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.94.0
Qt Version: 5.15.4
Kernel Version: 5.15.41-1-lts (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz
Memory: 15,3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620
I had tested KDE Plasma with Wayland in the past, and the main problem I was experiencing, which made it unusable to me, was that I had to scale the display. I could scale the display, but the main problem was that, while KDE applications looked nice, the GTK applications looked blurred. This problem is still there, as you can see from this screenshot (here, I scaled the display to 150%):
You can see that the System settings dialog and Dolphin (in the background) look nice, but the EndeavourOS Welcome app and Firefox (in the background), which are GTK applications, look blurred!
Thus, I tried another way: I went back to 100% Display and tried to work on the Font HDPI scaling, though Plasma discourages doing that (it suggests using the display scaling). I tried with both 120 and 140 the result is satisfactory, as you can see from these screenshots:
IMPORTANT: You have to log out and log in to apply these changes. At least, I had to do that in my experiments.
There’s still one caveat to solve: GTK4 applications, like Gedit (the Gnome text editor) and Eye of Gnome (the Gnome image viewer), which, in this version of EndeavourOS, are already provided in their 42 version (using libadwaita). These applications are not considering font scaling. To solve that, you have to install Gnome Tweaks and adjust the “Scaling Factor” from there. Then, everything works also for those applications (Gedit is the one with “Untitled Document 1,” and Eye of Gnome is the dark window in the foreground):
With the Wayland session in Plasma, you can enjoy the default touchpad gestures (which, at the moment, are not configurable):
- 4 Finger Swipe Left –> Next Virtual Desktop.
- 4 Finger Swipe Right –> Previous Virtual Desktop.
- 4 Finger Swipe Up –> Desktop Grid.
- 4 Finger Swipe Down –> Available Window Grid.
Moreover, the scrolling speed for the touchpad can be configured (while, on X11, I wasn’t able to):
There are still a few strange things happening: the splash screen has the title bar and window buttons if you start Eclipse! 😀
I’ll try to experiment with this configuration also in other distributions.
Let’s cross our fingers! 😉
As you mention Eclipse: one thing that really bothers me is client-side decorations (CSD) appearing in system dialogues, like the file picker, where you’ll see the “open” and “cancel” buttons on top. This is incredibly ugly, inconsistent with the rest of Eclipse dialogues, also it can get unusable if your application theme does not support it.
Haven’t found a clue how to solve it. GNOME’s approach of breaking compatibility to other desktop environments really sucks.
I agree!
In any case, for Eclipse (which I use every day), I use the “trick” to run it with X11 backend, instead of Wayland, by setting this variable environment in front of the executable (or in the .desktop file):
GDK_BACKEND=x11Hello. I am tired. Linux distributions and linux software should leave xorg aside and continue with Wayland and quickly catch up with the windows operating system in this regard. Users are messing around with some really incredible settings. Linux distributions, linux desktop managers, linux software should leave xorg, which is outdated and unfortunately no longer possible to upgrade, and switch to wayland software. And when this happens, wayland development will progress much faster.