KDE Plasma 5.20 will properly support screen recording on Wayland and more

The KDE team working on the Plasma desktop environment are busy pushing ahead for the 5.20 release due later this year and it's sounding great.

Developer Nate Graham blogs about work done quite often, with a recent post catching my attention. While Wayland support has come along nicely now, there's still areas that are lacking compared to the ancient X11 and they keep on plugging those holes.

With Plasma 5.20, screen recording and screencasting are one area that should be a lot better, as they've now wired up what's needed for it to be properly supported with Plasma on Wayland. Their code is based upon using Pipewire, a project that itself aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. Graham mentioned that this will work with OBS Studio and that there's "more to come".

Klipper, the KDE clipboard manager was also ported over to Wayland, so it should work as you would expect. Additional Wayland work includes the last-used keyboard layout actually being remembered now too.

Another nice feature enhancement is the ability to adjust what you're shown when clicking on grouped apps in the window list / icons only task manager. Say you have a bunch of Dolphin file manager windows opened, when you click on the icon you can configure what happens now like having a text list pop up instead of a big overlay of windows.

There's also a bunch of bug fixes and performance improvements coming, read more here.

KDE Plasma 5.20 is due to release in October 2020.