A KDE developer who regularly blogs about all the work going into the KDE ecosystem through the likes of the Plasma desktop environment and the various applications, has given an overview of what they expect to see through 2021.
Sounds like there's plenty of exciting work coming up for KDE and Plasma this year! Nate Graham mentions in the latest post that amongst other things, they might finally have a "Production-ready Plasma Wayland session". A lot of work went into this through 2020 and before that Graham mentioned that it "felt like a mess" but a whole year of progress changed that. Through 2021 we can expect to see a "trend of serious, concentrated Wayland work to continue in 2021" and to be in a better shape for more people to use.
Quite a long time coming, as it's been said that Wayland would replace X11 for years now and having KDE in top shape with it will certainly help push it forwards even more.
Something else exciting coming up is a replacement for the 'Kickoff' application launcher (Windows users would know it as a 'Start menu'). There's a merge request open, which they expect to be available in the Plasma 5.21 release for the new design and it's looking really quite slick:
On top of all that they're looking to get fingerprint support ready throughout the entire tech stack including everywhere you would need it from the login screen and the lock screen to their KAuth authorization library.
KDE does always look impressive, with tons of options for customization and hopefully 2021 shall be a big year for it.
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 January 2021 at 9:57 pm UTC
I don't have an issue with tearing, performance, or usability in and X and it feels like we are all switching just because developers don't like working on the old code base. Does anyone actually know what user problems Wayland will solve?
I love the scope of KDE's features, but between every major version it seems like useful things are left behind for unknown periods of time (Look @you global menu)
And the features that do exist always feel like they haven't been fleshed out (Installing addons is done in a ackward menu with no screenshots except a tiny thumbnail, no user-feedback and multiple installation sources with poorly named files making it difficult to understand which one is the newest version)
That and now the whole Qt 6.0 / Qt 5.15 Drama, I am surprised KDE is entering a "stable" time when Qt's new commercial LTS plans are essentially creating a year or more of instability. Seems bizarre.
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 January 2021 at 11:43 pm UTC
Quoting: ShmerlNvidia problems are far from limited to EGLsreams. For example they can't use dma-buf.
True, but looks like its on the way Shmerl.
Quoting: bingusTrue, but looks like its on the way Shmerl.
I don't think they can fix the situation with dma-buf as long as they refuse to cooperate with the Linux kernel and upstream their driver. Kernel developers already rejected such kind of "symbol poisoning" in the past.
And that's just one symptom that underlines the actual issue. Nvidia can fix things - let them upstream their driver or simply start supporting Nouveau which already exists in the kernel. But they don't want to, so I don't see the situation getting better any time soon.
Last edited by Shmerl on 5 January 2021 at 5:34 am UTC
Also the fractional scaling option causes blurring, you need to use specific values in Font DPI..
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