Plasma on Wayland

[rocky7x]

Hi,

Following on Martin Graesslin's call for Plasma on Wayland testing, I would like to ask how is it possible to switch to Wayland on Maui? Is there an official way?

[leszek]

It should be possible by installing the package plasma-workspace-wayland and logout and choosing the wayland session.
However this only works on the free software graphic drivers.

[rocky7x]

OK, I've tried it and with plasma 5.10 it's not yet really usable, but nearly there. These are the things that bother me the most, maybe they are already fixed, just I don't know how to fix them:

1. tap click on touchpad doesn't work - I have to click with the button
   
2. desktop effects still have some glitches, like when I have the fading effect, popups leave ghosts
   
3. the font is very big, there is probably a way how to reduce it
   

Apart from this, it is quite usable, I will give it a try once 5.11 hits Maui, it will probably be much better

What I was very happy to see is, that bumblebee WORKS!!! So running Wayland session with Intel card and then using Bumblebee with Nvidia for games works like a charm

[leszek]

tap click on touchpad doesn't work - I have to click with the button

Yeah this is using the new libinput driver so the synaptic driver won't be used here.
Are you able to configure the touchpad via systemsettings?

the font is very big, there is probably a way how to reduce it

Yeah this I can confirm. I wonder if it has something to do with using the config from the X11 plasma session.

If you really seriously want to help testing Plasma on Wayland you could download the KDE Neon Developer Edition Git Unstable which ships also with the Plasma Wayland session.
https://neon.kde.org/download

[leszek]

Yeah this I can confirm. I wonder if it has something to do with using the config from the X11 plasma session.

Found a solution. Just force the right DPI in font settings in systemsettings. I forced mine to 96 and it just looks fine.

[rocky7x]

Hi,

OK, I've tried it a bit more on both Maui and Netrunner and with 5.10 it's still not really usable. I wanted to have it as a daily driver so use it during the daily work and report any bugs I find, but since it crashes too often (with every crash I have to reboot) and the bugs are quite numerous, I'll wait until the update to 5.11. KDE Neon is a very barebones system for me, so cannot use it really for daily work.

Cheers...

[leszek]

What does actually crash? Plasmashell?
Or does it freeze?

I don't get why you need to restart your pc on a crash.
It runs pretty stable here. Plasmashell sometimes still crashes but restarts itself pretty much all the time.

[rocky7x]

Well, I've read that using multiple screens is still a problem with Wayland. And I use 2 screens at work. When it crashes, everything just goes black (both screens) and the system freezes. No command can be entered, not even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace helps - the keyboard and mouse are dead. So I can only do a hard reboot.

[leszek]

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is disabled since a few years by default and does not work for wayland. Try the magic sysreq key combo Alt+PrintScr+K instead. That should give you the ability to switch to a tty terminal on ctrl+alt+f1 and restarting sddm with systemctl restart sddm.

[Kurtbw]

Well, I've read that using multiple screens is still a problem with Wayland. And I use 2 screens at work. When it crashes, everything just goes black (both screens) and the system freezes. No command can be entered, not even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace helps - the keyboard and mouse are dead. So I can only do a hard reboot.

Just putzing with it on a laptop and I'm getting black screens requiring a hard reboot as well.  Again, I'm not trying to do any sort of serious work at this point.

I will try some more in the next week or two, after I write down the keyboard commands leszek contributed.