The team at KDE are producing upgrades for Plasma very quickly, with another weekly update out from developer Nate Graham with some major new bits being hooked up.
In preparation for the next Plasma release, a fingerprint manager has been added so that Plasma will support fingerprint authentication in the next version. This expanded support allows you to use your fingers for passworded operations like using sudo, unlocking the screen and more.
Perhaps the bigger one though is initial support for NVIDIA's new GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) backend, which arrived in the recent NVIDIA Beta 495.29.05 driver. This means that eventually when it's stable in NVIDIA drivers, along with a new Plasma release, that KDE should default to it for NVIDIA giving a much improved Wayland session experience. They still have some quirks to work out but it's getting there now.
Discover, the software store on Plasma, also saw lots of tweaks like knowing you have a package installed when trying to open a downloaded package and giving you the correct option to remove it. Discover will also now let you enable, disabled and remove Flatpak repositories and also enable and disable distribution repositories too.
Lots more tweaks done like the lock screen showing the Sleep and Hibernate actions, their newer Overlay effect gained a blurred background and allows you to remove / rename or add more Virtual Desktops.
There are also lots of bug fixes coming in. Good, since Valve will use Plasma on the Steam Deck for the main desktop session so hopefully it will be in great shape for Valve to eventually update the version used.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Mohandevir Oct 25, 2021
Just installed Kubuntu 20.04 this weekend... I was using Pop_OS! for the last year and half, or so.
I've been pleasantly surprised with KDE... Gnome required me to uncheck "Allow flipping", in the Nvidia control panel, to prevent screen flickering while streaming from my Nvidia GPU rig to my Nvidia Shield. I also had to disable the HDMI audio output to prevent audio degradation (it usually happened after 15 to 20 mins of playtime). All of those issues also affected KDE, before I decided to settle with Pop_OS! (tested it back then).
This time, I didn't had to do any of those tweaks on KDE. No flickering, no audio degradation after a 1 hour run, friday evening and a 2 hour run, yesterday.
Nice progression by the KDE team! Crossing my fingers that it keeps on going this way!
Valve's implication in Kwin support at work here?
Edit: It brings me back full circle... It all started with Kubuntu 7.10, for me.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 25 October 2021 at 1:40 pm UTC
I've been pleasantly surprised with KDE... Gnome required me to uncheck "Allow flipping", in the Nvidia control panel, to prevent screen flickering while streaming from my Nvidia GPU rig to my Nvidia Shield. I also had to disable the HDMI audio output to prevent audio degradation (it usually happened after 15 to 20 mins of playtime). All of those issues also affected KDE, before I decided to settle with Pop_OS! (tested it back then).
This time, I didn't had to do any of those tweaks on KDE. No flickering, no audio degradation after a 1 hour run, friday evening and a 2 hour run, yesterday.
Nice progression by the KDE team! Crossing my fingers that it keeps on going this way!
Valve's implication in Kwin support at work here?
Edit: It brings me back full circle... It all started with Kubuntu 7.10, for me.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 25 October 2021 at 1:40 pm UTC
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QuotePerhaps the bigger one though is initial support for NVIDIA's new GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) backendI don't get it, wasn't gbm supposed to be the standard way of implementing things versus the previously proposed by nvidia itself: eglstreams?
Now that nvidia finally supports gbm, why does kde need to support the "nvidia's new gbm" too?
Why is still vendor specific?
-edit
Maybe i got it, they just switched away from eglstreams for new nvidia drivers (?)
Last edited by kokoko3k on 25 October 2021 at 9:06 pm UTC
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For those people thinking about using the wayland session on kde, you can use the command
to check which programs are running using wayland and which are using x11 (xwayland)
Since some popular software like browsers still require some tweaks to use native wayland, this command can help you to identify it. Also make sure to change pulseaudio to pipewire for better compatibility.
Last edited by BielFPs on 26 October 2021 at 12:42 pm UTC
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.showDebugConsole to check which programs are running using wayland and which are using x11 (xwayland)
Since some popular software like browsers still require some tweaks to use native wayland, this command can help you to identify it. Also make sure to change pulseaudio to pipewire for better compatibility.
Last edited by BielFPs on 26 October 2021 at 12:42 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Oct 25, 2021
This made me look into whether or not my Thinkpad P52's fingerprint reader is supported yet... nope. Sounds like some progress was made with the python validity library being used though...
Fingerprint reader support is still very hit and miss on Linux in general. I remember long ago, Gnome had it within the UI... now I'm not sure if it's supposed to only show up if fprintd finds a supported chip or what the deal is though. Wonder if I still have my USB one I bought many moons ago....
Fingerprint reader support is still very hit and miss on Linux in general. I remember long ago, Gnome had it within the UI... now I'm not sure if it's supposed to only show up if fprintd finds a supported chip or what the deal is though. Wonder if I still have my USB one I bought many moons ago....
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I played with Wayland session in 5.23.1, but adaptive sync has some weird problem. Digging into it for a bug report.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 October 2021 at 12:00 am UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 October 2021 at 12:00 am UTC
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Quoting: MohandevirJust installed Kubuntu 20.04 this weekend... I was using Pop_OS! for the last year and half, or so.
I've been pleasantly surprised with KDE... Gnome required me to uncheck "Allow flipping", in the Nvidia control panel, to prevent screen flickering while streaming from my Nvidia GPU rig to my Nvidia Shield. I also had to disable the HDMI audio output to prevent audio degradation (it usually happened after 15 to 20 mins of playtime). All of those issues also affected KDE, before I decided to settle with Pop_OS! (tested it back then).
This time, I didn't had to do any of those tweaks on KDE. No flickering, no audio degradation after a 1 hour run, friday evening and a 2 hour run, yesterday.
Nice progression by the KDE team! Crossing my fingers that it keeps on going this way!
Valve's implication in Kwin support at work here?
Edit: It brings me back full circle... It all started with Kubuntu 7.10, for me.
Did you know that you can install KDE on Pop!_OS? It's the same repos as Kubuntu too.
sudo apt install kde-standard
2 Likes, Who?
Holzkohlen Oct 26, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsSince some popular software like browsers still require some tweaks to use native wayland, this command can help you to identify it. Also make sure to change pulseaudio to pipewire for better compatibility.
Some browsers meaning almost pretty much all of them, or at least all chromium-based ones (which is a lot).
If you use fractional scaling chromium-based browsers become super blurry. You can set some options via terminal to use ozone to get around that, but then you get other issues. But hey, at least HiDPI support is slightly better on wayland
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Quoting: BielFPsFor those people thinking about using the wayland session on kde, you can use the commandqdbus org.kde.KWin /Kwin org.kde.KWin.showDebugConsole
That didn't work for me. But I simply open Krunner (Alt+F2) and type in KWin and it offers to open that console from there.
UPDATE:
Looks like you had a typo. This one works from the terminal (/KWin is case sensitive there).
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.showDebugConsoleLast edited by Shmerl on 26 October 2021 at 7:33 am UTC
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Quoting: kokoko3kNow that nvidia finally supports gbm, why does kde need to support the "nvidia's new gbm" too?
Why is still vendor specific?
It's just a guess but i could imagine it has to do with removing the nv-specific code-paths that were implemented for EGLstreams-Support?
Either way it's good to see that nvidia finally admitted defeat and succumb to supporting the standards ^^
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Mohandevir Oct 26, 2021
Quoting: KohlyKohlQuoting: MohandevirJust installed Kubuntu 20.04 this weekend... I was using Pop_OS! for the last year and half, or so.
I've been pleasantly surprised with KDE... Gnome required me to uncheck "Allow flipping", in the Nvidia control panel, to prevent screen flickering while streaming from my Nvidia GPU rig to my Nvidia Shield. I also had to disable the HDMI audio output to prevent audio degradation (it usually happened after 15 to 20 mins of playtime). All of those issues also affected KDE, before I decided to settle with Pop_OS! (tested it back then).
This time, I didn't had to do any of those tweaks on KDE. No flickering, no audio degradation after a 1 hour run, friday evening and a 2 hour run, yesterday.
Nice progression by the KDE team! Crossing my fingers that it keeps on going this way!
Valve's implication in Kwin support at work here?
Edit: It brings me back full circle... It all started with Kubuntu 7.10, for me.
Did you know that you can install KDE on Pop!_OS? It's the same repos as Kubuntu too.
sudo apt install kde-standard
Yep! I know and tried on many occasions... It's just that it's always half baked and not totally integrated... I'm not a big fan of running multiple DE on the same OS, but thanks for the proposition.
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