KDE Plasma - Going all-in on a Wayland future

English Open Chat
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21

Recently tried Wayland: works much better than before - did not break my X11 saved/restored session any more - restored all the windows correctly. Only konsole opened 1 terminal tab for me instead of 3. Looks and works mostly fine for me, for example, I like system scaling for old apps, HDR, color profiles, etc.

Just small lacks:

  • Not all apps restored correctly like I mentioned above with konsole.
  • HiDPI global scaling ratio scales/calculates apps and fonts sizes differently in X11 and Wayland for some reason, so need to correct its value after switching.
  • Gkrellm is not accepted as a panel in Wayland or XWayland and produces entry in task bar.
22

I can’t speak to the other issues, but I suspect your gkrellm issue is a gkrellm issue, and not anything to do with Plasma and/or Wayland.

23

No, Gkrellm is an old app of course but it works correctly in X11. Have issues only in Wayland. Suspect xwayland does not work 100% correctly or still misses some features or windows attributes.

24

This may be of interest to you also… Display Manager Rework :< openSUSE:DisplayManagerRework - openSUSE Wiki

25

Yes, old news. It’s already done (as above).

26

True and/but, many of the things which were needed previously to tweak Mozilla Firefox and a Java Home Banking application I use, no longer need the tweaks to correct the HiDPI font sizes on the screen.

  • An exception is LibreOffice – for the case of Writer I need to use a zoom of 120 % to get a DIN A4 page to display at the correct size on my screen: «measured by holding a sheet of DIN A4 paper against the screen … »
27

I had different scaling in Chrome based browser and Telegram - need to correct both: global scaling and in the applications. But like I said looks much better than version year or more ago.

1 Like
28

In a Konsole tab where a vim session was executing, I noticed “vim-nox11” –

 > ps -q 79235
    PID TTY          TIME CMD
  79235 pts/2    00:00:07 vim-nox11
 > 
 > which -a vim
/usr/bin/vim
/bin/vim
 > 
 > which -a vim-nox11 
/usr/bin/vim-nox11
/bin/vim-nox11
 > 
 > file /usr/bin/vim /bin/vim
/usr/bin/vim: symbolic link to alts
/bin/vim:     symbolic link to alts
 > 
 > file /usr/bin/vim-nox11 /bin/vim-nox11
/usr/bin/vim-nox11: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 4.3.0, BuildID[sha1]=696eec6c162ef3902c15282b90d02eeb360ef397, stripped
/bin/vim-nox11:     ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 4.3.0, BuildID[sha1]=696eec6c162ef3902c15282b90d02eeb360ef397, stripped
 > 
 > rpm --query --whatprovides /usr/bin/vim-nox11 /bin/vim-nox11
vim-9.1.1406-160000.3.2.x86_64
vim-9.1.1406-160000.3.2.x86_64
 > 
 > alts -l vim
Binary: vim
Alternatives: 1
  Priority: 20*  Target: /usr/bin/vim-nox11
                 Group: vi, vim
 >

I could be mistaken but, it seems that “VIM - Vi IMproved” has been setup for Wayland …

29

That’s one of the Plasm Wayland Known Significant Issues. If I understand this correctly, fixing it requires new features to be added to Wayland because Wayland currently does not support the concept. If an application is forced to run under Xwayland, then it should correctly save and restore its window positions - so that’s one workaround.

The implementation of Plasma for Wayland now does some scaling automatically based on display DPI (which was not the case for X11).

I would like the option to force applications to use to the same dimensions on screen as they would on paper. Some applications, such as gwenview, are scaling aware, but others are scaling unaware, or in some cases scaling aware but buggy, so the same image at 100% can appear as several different sizes depending on which application is used to view it.

For my 27" 4K display, under Plasma-Wayland, I employ an unsupported hack to disable scaling, I create $HOME/.config/plasma-workspace/env/hidpi.sh with the content:

    export QT_USE_PHYSICAL_DPI=1
    export QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING=0

Then most (all?) applications do not scale. To fix the tiny fonts and icons, I boost all the fonts in Plasma Settings to about 16pt or 14pt and panel height to 72. However, chrome still doesn’t behave the same as X11, it renders everything tiny, I have to use chrome’s scale setting to scale it up.

The KDE developers don’t see a significant need to support non-scaled hidpi. The best approach is probably to get used to the way it’s done in Wayland.

30

Issue with the SDDM Login Screen and failing to load the cursor theme – systemd Journal entries at boot time:

[   15.170630] sddm-helper-start-wayland[1756]: "Accepting client connections on sockets: QList(\"wayland-0\")\n"
[   16.019329] sddm-helper-start-wayland[1756]: "kwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\nkwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\n"
[   35.659702] sddm-helper-start-wayland[1756]: "kwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\nkwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\n"
[   35.660944] sddm-helper-start-wayland[1756]: "kwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\nkwin_core: Failed to load cursor theme \"default\"\n"
[   47.240703] sddm-helper-start-wayland[1756]: wayland greeter finished 0 QProcess::NormalExit

Solution is here: <https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1996#issuecomment-3583349508>

Note the text:

System Preferences, Login Screen (SDDM), press the kebab menu or the three dots and then press Apply plasma preferences…

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Bildschirmfoto_20251205_1932351464×1090 194 KB

31

I am perfectly fine with Wayland as long as A. It doesn’t compromise my workflow in any shape or form. And B. My X11 apps are at the very least USABLE.

32

@40476 So, this has been on the way for some time, have you not prodded the developers of your usable apps to port them to Wayland? This really is an application issue, not a distribution issue…

33

Every app I needed has worked on Wayland, with the X11 to Wayland bridge in KDE, or had a suitable replacement. I don’t want to sound dumb but at the end of the day it needs to “just work.”

34

@40476 Oh, for sure, but the writing has been on the wall for some time, If consumers of applications don’t prod the developers, what are distributions meant to do?

3 Likes
35

My current view:

  • KDE Plasma applications are fine – also digiKam –
    HiDPI is fine
    Colour Management seems to be behaving

  • GTK applications – also fine – LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox.

  • Java HBCI application is also behaving without any issues.