Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain what’s so much better about Wayland support?

There's a large amount of robustness improvements, particularly around multi-monitor and docking scenarios with dynamic and fractional DPI. We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor crash and restart.

We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.

We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).

More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.

Performance work.

Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.

Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.

Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.

Thank you(plural) for all your efforts. Donated as well.

I feel like this iteration of KDE will finally convince me to move to linux permanently.

Thanks for the donation, it really helps :-)

Super excited to play around with this on my Steam Deck! Wayland support was actually one of the main reasons I left KDE on my primary machine, eventually in favor of Sway. Really glad to see so much progress has been made on that front :)

Wow. That’s quite a lot. Thanks.

HDR support is huge and is the last thing preventing me from ditching Windows on my gaming PC.

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with KDE itself or if it's Kubuntu's fault but one small annoyance I've dealt with is how my wacom drawing tablet is mapped to the screen space. I've had to manually map it so that the tablet touch space isn't spread across three monitors and I've also had this setting get reset. I'm really excited to see more support for multiple monitors coming down the pipe. Do you know anything about the tablet issue or is this something I just need to do some more research on?

Actually you can configure all of this with xsetwacom. I don’t remember the exact commands and it’s mildly tricky but after that you get a configuration file that shouldn’t move (or that you can backup).

>We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor crash and restart

Sweet this is one of the reasons I gave up on KDE 5 I tried a couple months ago. Some combination of KVM and amdgpu was causing crashes (I think something to do with hotplugging displays and Wayland) and it seemed like everything downstream got nuked as well

That RDP screen sharing is very interesting. Does it require an open session attached to a real screen, or is starting headless remote sessions possible?

I believe[1] this is just attaching to an open session.

From what I have read, login sessions require integration with a login manager, and from what I understand that work isn't done yet (this work being a prerequisite).

It seems[2] that gnome is going to support this in a future release (march?)?

I'm sure KDE will have something similar in the works eventually. I currently use xrdp/xorg-xrdp for headless remote login sessions, and while it works ok, I would love to switch to using something more integrated into kde itself.

[1]: https://discuss.kde.org/t/remote-desktop-using-the-rdp-proto...

[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-RDP-Remote-Login

Interesting, I just posted a question to Reddit about this[1] but I have been testing and using KRdp myself for a while. I'm one of those users who (due to blah blah blah) must use Wayland, but also must have some remote desktop capability (to connext to my Linux GUI environment).

For this reason, I was stuck on Fedora GNOME for a long while, because only they had it.

KRdp[2][3] looks promising, even though (like GNOME) it requires a GUI session to exist first, before you can connect via RDP. But there are ways to deal with that if you really gotta have it.

But this support is not actually implemented in any app in KDE Plasma 6, is it? My understanding is that it is possible, but there is no built-in functionality to take advantage of it. More "you can build an RDP server now that will work on Wayland" than "there is an RDP server that has been released". (I think?)

[1]: My reddit question, which also includes how to download and try the KRdp alpha/example thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1b3kc0p/what_ever_happ...

[2]: the project itself doesn't have a lot of info: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp

[3]: the announcement blog has more: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/

yes, for now it shares your open session, but we plan to expand on it in the future so you could have completely headless sessions

also in next point Plasma releases we'll focus to make its experience more out of the box, to be able to configure it from System Settings and what not

I installed plasma6 on my Framework 13 running NixOS this morning, and it was the first time in my life that not only did fractional scaling work out-of-the-box, but it automatically picked the appropriate scale! Love when the little things work so well. Thank you!

It's safer as every program is isolated but it crashes more often because programs are isolated and expect not to be isolated. I often switch back to x11 whenever I try it I think nice it's fast and has bells and whistles but there basics aren't there. It took x11 a LONG time to be usable so I expect the same with Wayland.

Faster, better support for multiple screens with different geometry, safer, and ultimately maintained. Also, at this point, it works really well, and honestly is not a drag on the user. I moved to Wayland last December and have really enjoyed it. I'm using the KDE Neon distribution, and it's really really really nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com