Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible.
But that’s not all, of course. This was another big week! Read on to see the rest:
Plasma 6
(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)
General info – Open issues: 118
The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames! Instead Breeze-themed apps adopt the clean design of modern Kirigami apps, with views separated from one another with single-pixel lines! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10):
In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now preliminary support for playing HDR-capable games when using an HDR-capable screen! (Xaver Hugl, link)
Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording! (Noah Davis, link)
System Settings’ Printers page has gotten a major overhaul and now includes the features internally that it used to direct you to external apps for. The result is much nicer and more integrated, without a cascading soup of dialog windows (Mike Noe, link):
The Plasma Panel settings have been redesigned again, and this time everything is in one dialog; no more nested sub-menus! This work fixed 14 open bug reports (Niccolò Venerandi and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):
Ark is now significantly faster to compress files using xz and zstd compression, as they are now multi-threaded (Zhangzhi Hu, link)
When you run Flatpak apps, they’ll no longer prompt you to approve or deny “background activity”; the whole concept of this has been removed as it was kinda sus and not useful at all (David Edmundson, link)
There’s now a simple setting to disable notification sounds systemwide, for those of you who don’t like them (Ismael Asensio, link 1, link 2, and link 3):
Improved Plasma’s start time rather significantly–up to a few whole seconds (Harald Sitter, link)
The double-click speed setting returns, and now lives on System Settings’ General Behavior page. Before you ask why it’s not on the mouse Page, it’s because it affects touchpads too and that has its own page, and duplicating the setting on both pages seemed messy and ugly (Nicolas Fella, link)
Syncing your Plasma settings to SDDM now also syncs your desired NumLock state on boot (Chandradeep Dey, link)
In QtWidgets-based apps, you can open the context menu for the selected thing with the Shift+F10 shortcut (Felix Ernst, link 1 and link 2)
You can now open System Monitor with the Meta+Escape shortcut (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Fixed a wide variety of multi-screen issues related to screens sometimes not turning on at the right times or becoming visually frozen until going to another VT and back (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that could cause desktop icon positions to be mis-remembered, especially if the system has ever had multiple screens connected (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)
Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to start transitioning to night mode at inappropriate times when using a certain combination of settings (Sanjay Swain, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)
Just in case you have a window that fails to set a minimum size, KWin no longer lets you resize it to a width of zero pixels, whereupon it would become invisible and impossible to find (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)
In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, items’ full descriptions are now visible, instead of getting cut off at some point (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
- 47 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 52 last week). Current list of bugs
- 146 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Added a GUI test to make sure that Panel Edit Mode can be entered (Fushan Wen, link)
Added some GUI tests for functionality of the wallpaper chooser dialog (Fushan Wen, link)
Added some GUI tests for KRunner’s plugins and their presence in the relevant System Settings page (Fushan Wen, link)
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re past the 60% mark, but we’re not there yet! So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂
If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
“The double-click speed setting returns, and now lives on System Settings’ General Behavior page. Before you ask why it’s not on the mouse Page, it’s because it affects touchpads too and that has its own page, and duplicating the setting on both pages seemed messy and ugly (Nicolas Fella, link)”
I don’t think it’s messy to have both. Actually it might make sense to have them separate, i.e. to set different double click speeds for mouse and touchpad.
Can only speek for myself, but I am certainly doing double click on a touchpad significantly slower than with a mouse.
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Unfortunately the setting is global and not per-device, and we don’t easily have a way to make such links at the moment.
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Great work this week as always !
As for the single/double clic setting, why not put a shortcut in the mouse settings for this, as many users will look for it there ?
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For the reason mentioned in the post, as well as in the comment above
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Another round of amazing work, thankyou!
Is that UI for Sound Themes available in Plasma 5? (https://pointieststick.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/image-6.png)
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Nah, it’s a new feature only in Plasma 6.0!
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“The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. ” – I did expected many things with Wayland-loving destructors at helm but I certainly did not expect clear MANIPULATION like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231023140410/https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers – Please note what are considered True Showstoppers there.
So to put it clearly: you moved True Showstoppers to Non-Showstoppers so you can say that “The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed” – This in fact made already very questionable metric to no-value metric.
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These points have been re-evaluated and they turned out to be n real showstoppers. It’s not a manipulation.
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Also you have actually also “showstoppers” on X11: no mixed dpi / refresh rates, security, and more … It’s a tradeoff in both directions.
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Bugs in the Nvidia driver can’t be Plasma showstoppers because it’s not up to KDE to fix the frigging Nvidia driver.
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@aleks It is manipulation when you say “look we fixed showstoppers” and before that you move biggest issues that need more work out off the list.
“re-evaluated” stop with corporate newspeak. “We decided we do not care about them”.
When you understand that some people do not want to be beta testers for wayland. Fix all wayland regressions and then people may start switch to that.
Some people use linux – since kde 4 and our enthusiasm towards new tech is long gone – what such people expect is gradual upgrades and not breaks of Userspace.
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Items move off that part of the wiki once they’re fixed by us, fixed upstream, or re-evaluated to no longer be showstoppers. All of this is done out in the open; that page is public and changes are explained with reasons (standard Wiki stuff) so it should be pretty clear that we’re not trying to conceal anything.
“re-evaluated” isn’t corporate doublespeak, it’s a normal way of expressing that priorities have changed, or the effort required to do something has been deemed infeasible in comparison to the expected benefits.
There’s no reason to be scared of Wayland; if your stuff doesn’t work well on it right now, you’re welcome to continue using the X11 session. “Wayland by default” doesn’t mean “X11 is thrown away right this moment.” However Support for X11 *will* be thrown away at some point in the next 10 years (possibly even sooner) so I would recommend submitting bug reports for the things that don’t work well for you so that your experience can be noted and added to the prioritization heuristics for Wayland bugs.
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@Nate it is manipulation and newspeak – and don’t start with items are moving out from the list. This what I mean by manipulation, you manipulated list so you can mark wayland session default even when the targets are not met. In other words your definition of showstopper is worthless when developers can remove the showstopper to force their wants thru.
Majority of users will not track such list – they will look at it once and expect it to be true. Now again look at the “three remaining” it’s manipulation. If next sentence would contain information or if you moved that long before I could consider that mistake but you removed them targeting wayland being default. As such you should provide that information to comunity but decided not to.
Fact that you did not “hide” (changing wiki can be already considered hiding) information does not make it not manipulation it makes it bad manipulation
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The deal was that if the three remaining showstoppers aren’t fixed yet by the final release, then we revert and go back to X11 by default. Like I said, we decided to do it now rather than after that happens because we want to get in more testing time to make sure the Wayland session is in an even better state by the final release in 3 and a half months, assuming the remaining showstoppers are fixed by then.
But on the subject of some issues being reclassified as non-showstoppers, that’s simply the process of plans and priorities sometimes getting changed; it’s normal in every project. If it doesn’t seem normal to you, then I’m afraid you don’t have a realistic understanding of how project management works in the real world where we have competing goals, limited resources, hard deadlines, etc.
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Will Plasma6/KF6 applications finally store config files in sensible locations? The serch’n’replace of ~/.kde of 4.x to ~/.config in 5.x was very messy.
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It’s up to apps to opt into that; see https://rabbitictranslator.com/kconfig/ for instructions about how they can do so. It’s really not that hard, but it’s probably the sort of thing where someone who cares about this is going to have to start submitting patches to make it happen. Maybe you? 🙂
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Wayland by default…
ok, this is a minor thing (and probably a wayland bug) but can anyone verify this bug:
on wayland
sign in to web.Skype.com
and on a chat type the letter “é” (note: its not just an “e”!)
it crashes Skype and this does not happen on x session
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Oh… and an important note: é must be the first letter on the typed message!!!
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I’m very excited about the Breeze visual overhaul!
I hope it can stay (as there still seem to be discussions) and I also hope the contributor manages to fix the last glitches: e.g. the scrollbar in your “Save File” screenshot has double borders at the top and at the bottom.
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How much hope is there that proper color management will be working before the Plasma 6 release? I note with concern that it has been demoted to “non-showstopper”, with the wiki saying it requires the forever-stalled Wayland protocols work to be implemented in KWin.
Xaver has a branch implementing the draft spec but it seems to be not ready to ship – they describe it as “mostly hacked together for testing (no tone mapping, gamut mapping just clips colors outside of the target gamut and that badly, only perceptual is supported, only sRGB and PQ transfer functions are supported, and color-representation is just a dummy impl right now)”.
I bring this up because this was perhaps the most significant issue raised in the recent Fedora 40 default-Wayland blowup. Working color management is not optional for most graphics people.
One of the most recent changes (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/8d25550c2208b19c3cb2de46364a9bbc9678487e) appears to have added support for gamut mapping windows on wide gamut screens, but only if those windows are not color managed (meaning that they target sRGB implicitly or explicitly).
The other issue is that there are a lot of moving pieces flying in at the last minute, and I’m not sure there any many people testing all this color management work. I’m happy to help test things, but that will probably need to wait for a beta release so that I can install packages without breaking my system. If there’s a good way for people with no C++ coding skill to help with this, I’d love to hear about that too.
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Yes, KWin has recently gained support for color management (up to sRGB) without need for the upstream Wayland protocol. So we have it already for Plasma 6. It doesn’t support wider gamut displays yet, but that’s also planned.
You can test the Alpha release already! Neon Unstable has it, and some other distros probably do as well.
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For my own part, I’m constantly setting frame and window borders as thick and chunky as possible, since the bother of landing the mouse /precisely/ on a 1px line is an infuriating peeve. For some reason 4 pixels was no waste at all on VGA resolution, but in the world of HD and beyond modern aesthetics has gone insane and demands no borders at all. It’s practically the same situation with disappearing beezles and the annoyance of holding modern phones and tablets.
Gimme something to grab on to! 🍑
Since KDE is so customizable, this isn’t a complaint.
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I’m not sure how that’s related to anything in the post, but the grabbable area of window edges is substantially thicker than 1px. I think it’s like 8 or 10px, it’s just that it’s invisible. If you make the window borders *visually* thicker, it doesn’t actually result in the grabbable area becoming larger until you get your window borders so think that they actually exceed the thickness of the invisible drag area.
Are you using an ancient version of Plasma? This has been the case for at least 4 or 5 years.
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Good progress as always! I’m excited to see the next Plasma!
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What about changing of brightness/RGB colors on external screens?
Similar to what brightness controller is doing on x11… Will that (or something similar) be implemented in Wayland?
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Color management has been aadded now for Plasma 6. Changing the brightness of external screens is also supported, but only for screens that support the DDC protocol.
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What about changing the brightness/color on external monitors? Something similar to what brightness controller is doing on x11… Will that, or something similar be implemented in Wayland?
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Redesigned of the panel options looks really good. I like it a lot.
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Hello! It;’sl all looking wonderful!
I was wondering, is the Breeze theme going to be revamped more generally beyond the icon set and the removal of internal frames mentioned in this post? Removing the frame is already nice but it the grey vibes and lines delimiting the different sections within apps feel a little dated (to me). Especially seeing what Plasma is actually capable of when it comes theming!!
e.g. https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1580061 (see the KDE desktop) or https://store.kde.org/p/1386453 or https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
I’m not at all saying it should be these, or even not going for such as dramatic change, they’re just examples of what is possible to get a more modern feel, while still keeping elements of Breeze (say the icon set and colour scheme in the first example).
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We’re not planning for a larger more general visual overhaul at the moment.
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In that panel settings screenshot, which of the two toggles at the bottom are on or off. Only position seems to be different and no background/color change to indicate it being on or off. That’s all, I just can’t tell if they are on or off and would be good if it was actually noticeable.
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The switches use both color and position. We could make the color difference more obvious, though. And I’d be in favor of adding some other kind of indicator, like a symbol on the handle or a word in the groove or something.
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TBH, I’d prefer checkboxes to remain checkboxes. Toggles are really *not* intuitive.
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Why not make the taskbar items with rounded corners? Something like this https://imgur.com/a/lvzyhpC
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That’s in progress. 🙂
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I’m a big fan of the new Breeze style shown at the very beginning of the article. Would it be possible to use this theme on KDE Plasma 5.27.9, before the v6 update?
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No I’m afraid not–at least, not without manually compiling or backporting a *lot* of things. Best to just wait for Plasma 6 when everything will be finished and polished up, IMO.
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Are other panel hiding options beside the usual autohide going away? I currently rely on “Windows can cover” as an alternative to Latte Dock’s (excellent) “intelligent autohide” since switching to native plasma panels.
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Intelligent auto-hide is in progress and should be merged any day now. We also plan to bring back “Windows Go Below” soon.
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Is there any info on explicit-sync stuff
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Will all icons be changed in Plasma 6, or just the folders?
And will the name of Breeze be changed to another one?
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It depends on what gets merged and when. The intention is certainly to overhaul all the icons, but this is a huge amount of work, and we can’t commit to making it happen for Plasma 6.0. Most likely the work will trickle in over the next couple of point releases after the initial release.
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I tested the ICC color profile stuff; it’s amazing, but I noticed it actually affects performance. I see a 10% increase in CPU usage when an ICc profile is enabled, and I have a game running the in-game CPU counter. If the game normally uses 30% CPU, it goes up to 40% with ICc. If the game’s using an allotted amount of CPU, like 70%, it goes to 80%.
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The feature was just merged like two weeks ago and you’re using an Alpha release. I think it’s safe to say this is in “you should report it as a bug” territory. 🙂
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Are ICC color profiles meant to affect performance so much that they make stuff laggy?
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I would imagine that is not what the feature is meant to do, no. It’s very new so I’m not surprised that there are bugs and performance issues. Please do submit bug reports!
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