KDE Plasma gets Wayland Fractional Scaling, Fixing Multi-Screen and a Steam Deck updater

I'm curious who had the multi-monitor issues? I've used KDE for around a year now with two monitors, first with Xorg which worked fine, and these days using Wayland, also working fine. Never had any identification issues.

Aside from Xorg randomly crashing (driver crash) under xorg, it's been working perfectly under wayland for a while.

How odd, either that or it's a nvidia thing (I use ATI)

In any case, it's great to see KDE improving! I avoided them for many years while I used XFCE after Gnome 3 hit because KDE 4 was well.. it was KDE4. And Gnome 3.. well we all know what that is.

Early KDE5 wasn't much better.

But now the current KDE is leaps and bounds ahead of what it once was and I use it daily!

I also had no multi-monitor issues with KDE KWin for a long time. I would say the support for that is working much better with KWin than with WMs in other DEs I tried. Not to mention the mess that is multi-monitor on closed/proprietary OSes (these really drive me crazy at work). But I started getting an annoying problem when I bought Marantz SR5015 AVR and routed one display through it. The problem here is that when you put AVR to sleep it in a way takes itself out of the PC → AVR → Display chain so it becomes PC → Display. And in reverse when you take it out of sleep it inserts itself again. And when these two transitions happen (from/to AVR sleep mode) is when I first got an issue with display management with KDE KWin. All the windows from the display that is connected through AVR are just moved to some other display when it transitions and windows are never restored to that display after the transition is done. And this is the only problem I have with KDE Kwin so far. And yeah I was also always using AMD GPUs. so maybe all the problems are just with crappy NVidia closed drivers that are really bad with integrating and interacting with normal GNU/Linux graphics stack.


Last edited by jrepin on 19 December 2022 at 1:14 pm UTC

KDE on Wayland is absolutely unusable for me since my external monitor has really low FPS, below 20. This is also a known bug and it's not looking like it will be fixed soon, which is a shame. :(

KDE on Wayland is absolutely unusable for me since my external monitor has really low FPS, below 20. This is also a known bug and it's not looking like it will be fixed soon, which is a shame. :(

One commenter has mentioned that disabling the discreet GPU in your bios may resolve the issue, any luck with that? It's worth a try :)

(I know it's a workaround rather than fixing the issue, but for immediate affect it may be useful)

Additionally, have you tried with this merge request? https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3254

It may (or may not) help :)

I'm curious who had the multi-monitor issues?

Not me, since I don't use multiple monitors. But a lot of the issues aren't from having a static multi-monitor setup like yours, but from frequently chopping and changing the monitor layout - for example, using a laptop that you sometimes plug into different monitors.

KDE on Wayland is absolutely unusable for me since my external monitor has really low FPS, below 20. This is also a known bug and it's not looking like it will be fixed soon, which is a shame. :(

One commenter has mentioned that disabling the discreet GPU in your bios may resolve the issue, any luck with that? It's worth a try :)

(I know it's a workaround rather than fixing the issue, but for immediate affect it may be useful)

Additionally, have you tried with this merge request? https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3254

It may (or may not) help :)

Well disabling the GPU is not an option since I am actively using it, that's why I am still on X11 (although it has many other issues).

I've only now seen the merge request but it looks like it failed.

If I turn off a monitor (to watch a movie for example) and the PC goes to sleep all the windows and icons from the extended screen are back to the main screen when waking up. (If you lock the icons there is no difference.)

As a rule a thumb every 3 KDE updates I must delete the settings to be able to login back after a reboot without a black background and no launcher.

System monitor has lost access to GPU sensors and is way less neat and compact than KSysGuard. It often feels like nothing is tested and tools are replaced without the equivalent features.

So in fine I use KDE because I can't stand Gnome but that's it…

Well disabling the GPU is not an option since I am actively using it, that's why I am still on X11 (although it has many other issues).

I've only now seen the merge request but it looks like it failed.

Oh!

Well hopefully the issue gets resolved, it at least looks like some people are trying to make progress on it

If I turn off a monitor (to watch a movie for example) and the PC goes to sleep all the windows and icons from the extended screen are back to the main screen when waking up. (If you lock the icons there is no difference.)

Your monitor may have an option to switch "power button action" - usually between standby and off, if it's set to "OFF" the computer is able to detect this action.

If set to standby, your computer should be oblivious to this action.

Thus, you may be able to set it to "Standby", avoiding this issue - Though it highly depends on the monitor and many don't offer the option to switch it off.

As for the sleeping when monitor off, that may be a power setting - check your power settings.

(This is a very simplified explanation)

I don't use KDE, but I've always respected it. There have almost always been a lot of good things about it, and yet for some time there it felt like KDE had no momentum, wasn't getting love from any major distro and so forth, and it seemed kind of unfair. It's nice to see it moving forward and getting some support.

One of these days I might check it out again . . . hard to say, I like Mint a lot and it doesn't really do KDE. Maybe if another "no, really, desktop oriented and just frigging works" distro comes along that does use KDE I'll give it a shot.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 19 December 2022 at 7:55 pm UTC

Well disabling the GPU is not an option since I am actively using it, that's why I am still on X11 (although it has many other issues).

I've only now seen the merge request but it looks like it failed.

Oh!

Well hopefully the issue gets resolved, it at least looks like some people are trying to make progress on it

If I turn off a monitor (to watch a movie for example) and the PC goes to sleep all the windows and icons from the extended screen are back to the main screen when waking up. (If you lock the icons there is no difference.)

Your monitor may have an option to switch "power button action" - usually between standby and off, if it's set to "OFF" the computer is able to detect this action.

If set to standby, your computer should be oblivious to this action.

Thus, you may be able to set it to "Standby", avoiding this issue - Though it highly depends on the monitor and many don't offer the option to switch it off.

As for the sleeping when monitor off, that may be a power setting - check your power settings.

(This is a very simplified explanation)

interesting! I need to investigate thx.

I'm curious who had the multi-monitor issues? I've used KDE for around a year now with two monitors, first with Xorg which worked fine, and these days using Wayland, also working fine. Never had any identification issues...:

Sometimes when I login my widgets get shuffled between screens, sometimes this happens with wallpapers, and sometimes both; although it doesn't happen that frequently. It should be noted that this is a static system (hardware-wise); I never change monitors in or out and I don't change their resolutions or layout or orientation, and yet the shuffles still happen from time to time.


Last edited by s01itude on 19 December 2022 at 11:33 pm UTC

Sometimes when I login my widgets get shuffled between screens, sometimes this happens with wallpapers, and sometimes both; although it doesn't happen that frequently. It should be noted that this is a static system (hardware-wise); I never change monitors in or out and I don't change their resolutions or layout or orientation, and yet the shuffles still happen from time to time.

This is EXACTLY my issue with the steam deck... Widgets shifting around randomly, i gotta unplug & power on the steam deck then plug it back into the dock for it all to work properly. It's kinda strange.


Last edited by Viesta2015 on 20 December 2022 at 5:08 am UTC

One problem I've had for the past 2 years with a 2-monitors setup with KDE is the main screen's wallpaper being randomly disabled at startup (2 times out of 3).

Have to re-set it and it's good for the remainder of the session.

KDE rules.

I will need to try, finally got my 1920x1080 screen to pair with an older 1366x768.

KDE on Wayland is absolutely unusable for me since my external monitor has really low FPS, below 20. This is also a known bug and it's not looking like it will be fixed soon, which is a shame. :(

One commenter has mentioned that disabling the discreet GPU in your bios may resolve the issue, any luck with that? It's worth a try :)

(I know it's a workaround rather than fixing the issue, but for immediate affect it may be useful)

Additionally, have you tried with this merge request? https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3254

It may (or may not) help :)

Well disabling the GPU is not an option since I am actively using it, that's why I am still on X11 (although it has many other issues).

I've only now seen the merge request but it looks like it failed.

I had similar issues and ended switching to Ubuntu 22.10 which has better fractional scaling support on Gnome X11 through a custom patch. Moreover, regarding disabling the dedicated GPU, at least in my case I'm only able to disable the integrated GPU which helps getting Wayland to work with better performance with a multi monitor setup (especially on KDE) but it's not what I want to do, especially on a laptop where I want to save battery when I'm not plugged in.