I have been using, and use from time to time, Wayland in KDE to see how it behaves. Waylad is the future for several reasons, including performance, security, and those touchpad gestures that testers love so much. Wayland on KDE is generally going well, but there are still things that make me go back to X11 to work smoothly. The project is working to put the pieces together, and in some time it will be possible to use it as in GNOME, where it is not 100% perfect either, it must be said.
Wayland will allow us to use touchpad gestures, and if last week they spoke to us that the animation that goes from the desktop (or a program) to the overview follows the speed of our fingers, this week have made that this also happens when moving from one desktop to another. The novelties are arriving with each new Plasma update, whether they are older or point, and they are inviting change.
15 minute bugs fixed
The count has dropped from 75 to 73; They have found 1 and have solved 3:
- Discover no longer constantly crashes, either on startup or when visiting the Installed page, if you have the Flatpak backend enabled with certain types of Flatpak controllers (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Manually sorted desktop icons are no longer reset to alphabetical sort mode when the computer is restarted. (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25, but they could backport to 5.24.5).
- Desktop icons now remember their positions based on resolution. (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25, but could arrive in Plasma 5.24.5).
Bug fixes and performance improvements coming to KDE
- Ark stuff can now be dragged and dropped onto items in Dolphin's Places panel, and it will extract those items there just as you'd expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Yakuake now opens to itself on the active screen, just as KRunner now does too (Martin Seher, Yakuake 22.08).
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Screen unlock no longer causes various visual glitches everywhere (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Activating Task Manager tasks via a Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut now always does what is expected, regardless of how many grouped tasks you have and whether they were last accessed with the mouse or keyboard ( Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5).
- The KWin window rule “Virtual Desktops” now works correctly (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Task Manager no longer displays incorrect icons for web applications using XWayland (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25).
- In Plasma X11 session, fixed a case where KWin could crash when laptop lid is closed while an external display is connected (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Task Manager grouped task tooltips are now resized and arranged correctly when using an RTL language, i.e. read from right to left (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
- On the Cursors page of System Preferences, cursor previews revert to showing animations on hover (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25).
- KDE applications capable of opening .psd files no longer crash when opening a malformed .psd image (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.94).
- When there are multiple widgets in the panel that open popups when clicked, clicking them no longer opens absurdly small and unusually small popups (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.94, although it is intended to patch to 5.93).
- Highlight effects reappear on hover in applets that still use the old deprecated PlasmaComponents 2 version of highlighting, such as Legacy Kickoff (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94).
Improvements in the user's interface
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the "swipe" gesture to switch virtual desktops now follows your fingers and animates desktops in the correct direction. (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25).
- The Night Color page of System Preferences now tints the screen as it will look in real life while dragging the slider to choose a color, so you can see the effect live (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25).
- Although not 100% technically correct, 1360x768 and 1366x768 screens now appear in "16:9" aspect ratio in the System Preferences display settings page (Philip Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25).
- And one that has not improved KDE, but affects: many bugs that affected KDE have been fixed, such as an interface that looked too small in Wayland to use scaling, popup buttons that did not open, Math menus that they were inaccessible in tab mode and that pasting text from Firefox was converted to Chinese.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24.5 will arrive on May 3, and Frameworks 5.94 will be available on the 14th of the same month. Plasma 5.25 will arrive as early as June 14, and KDE Gear 22.04 will land with new features on April 21. KDE Gear 22.08 does not yet have an official scheduled date.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.