I upgraded to leap 15.2 yesterday, which comes with plasma 5.18 and Qt 5.12. Obviously I have an Nvidia card in my system with proprietary driver nvidia-gfxG05-kmp-default-440.100_k5. Out of the box, wayland/full wayland doesn’t work. Upon logging in user session, it only gives me a black screen with a cursor on the left upper corner. Only way out is press the on/off button on my PC.
So I followed instructions as per: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia
Things got a bit improved. I can see the graphical interface. But a number of processes crashed when GUI is up, including splash screen and menu at the bottom. That makes GUI virtually unusable.
I know community KDE says I needed at least Qt 5.15 which is not the default in leap 15.2. I suppose I may be able to get around it by using KDE repository.
Has anyone had better luck using stock packages from 15.2 and get Wayland/Full Wayland work with Nvidia driver?
I don’t have a nvidia card. So Wayland works here in KDE (Intel graphics). But it works in a half-baked fashion. I’ve tried it, but I won’t use it with KDE.
I have also tried it in Tumbleweed, and there some of the problems are gone. But there are still problems.
Stick with X11 for KDE. Gnome does work pretty well with Wayland.
I used Intel built in graphics before. Intel graphics works without problems in KDE+Wayland for me too. But mine(HD460) doesn’t work well on a 4K monitor(e.g. video is behind sound when watching TV, noticeable artefacts for gradient). Eventually I got a slightly better graphics card, which happens to be an Nvidia.
The reason I chose KDE in 15.1 is because it does a better job in fractional scaling on a 4K display. Gnome doesn’t do that in 15.1. Does Gnome in Leap 15.2 support fractional scaling(e.g. 125%, 150%) flawlessly now?
It can be said that you’ll have a better experience without sacrificing much if anything by configuring to use XWayland instead of Full Wayland.
If the specific functionality is supported by Full Wayland, then the Wayland compositor (likely KWin-Wayland when running the KDE/Plasma Desktop) will provide that functionality like Full Wayland. But, if that functionality can’t be provided by the Wayland compositor and the request is made to the X server, the fnctionality should be provided that way.
I’m having virtually the same experience on Tumbleweed. I was previously able to run Wayland successfully when I had a Radeon GPU installed, but after replacing it with an Nvidia GPU, Wayland would no longer launch…just the black screen with the dead cursor in the top left corner. I made several attempts before giving up on Wayland. I did discover that the Magic SysRq commands still worked, so I could at least bail out of the black screen and perform a graceful shutdown.
On my fully-updated Tumbleweed, I have these versions:
Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200717
KDE Plasma Version: 5.19.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.72.0
Qt Version: 5.15.0
Kernel Version: 5.7.7-1-default
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz
Memory: 7.7 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: GeForce GT 1030/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Driver: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 450.57 (latest from Nvidia)