If you like KDE/Plasma like me and use it regularly then this weekly post from Nate is interesting which covers latest developments in KDE world from end user point of view.
Merry 'K’ristmas 
I’ve been liking KDE a lot! Thanks for the pointer to Nate’s blog!
I’ve you’ve not used KDE in recent history – definitely worth a look. Not the bloat-ware it was 10 years ago. Things like audio are well integrated, and Gnome apps (I still prefer Files) still work fine in KDE.
With 3 monitors now, virtual desktops seemed a little less nice for providing a context for different projects/activities. So I started looking into KDE Activities. They are a lot like virtual desktops, but seem a little cleaner. One neat thing is you can select which Activities you want an app to show up in. This allows me to show email in my HM default activity but hide when I’m working on projects to minimize distraction. If I need email for a bit in an activity, I can also enable it for that activity.
KDE has a lot of customizations for activities – one example is the menu favorites can be changed per activity.
@khem running plasma 5.23 here:
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I am also running plasma 5.23 on wayland !!!
this is much better than 5.22, its not as polished yet but its usable.
On laptop which has intel graphics I can not launch brave/chromium browser with ozone/wayland backend it works ok on nvidia card.
One thing that is useful is to to set a window rule to show an app, such as your notes app, in all activities. This can be done by:
- Window-Rules
- Window class, Exact Match: WorkFlowy
- Add Property → Activities: Apply Initially: All Activities
Fedora is planning to remove X11 completely with KDE/Plasma switch to QT6
https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/347
These are reasons
Three reasons for this removal:
- Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 and will be dropped in “a future major RHEL release”.
- Graphics fallback modes are Wayland-friendly now with SimpleDRM enabled since F36.
- NVIDIA drivers (since v495~v515) support GBM for Wayland instead of EGLStreams. Wayland is fully supported on current NVIDIA drivers.
I think this is a good move.
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The upgrade worked fine here on computer #1.
The release article is pretty impressive:
cool, are you using wayland ?
Yes, on Intel laptop with Intel graphics – Wayland worked great. I think the text looks even better than before.
AMD workstation with Nvidia graphics has been another story.
- could not log in under my main account with X11 or Wayland
- logging in with some other accounts worked with X11
- logging in with Wayland on any account gives me three black screens with a large cursor in the middle of each screen, nothing else
- had to nuke my account and create a new one with
useraddbefore I could log in with x11.
So, setting my main user account back up. Good to do this occasionally anyway to clean out the cruft …
Wish everything was as easy as Intel graphics …
And workstation has a fairly modern Nvidia card:
I have two machines, one is XPS with intel graphics, that is what I moved to using it first about 2 weeks ago using kde-unstable pacman feeds. The desktop has Nvidia card in it.
lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1)
Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB]
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
I have had it not boot into wayland for several months with Plasma 5, some random crash in KDE. I switched to using nouveau driver and it got magically fixed and it seems Plasma6+wayland seems to be holding on with nouveau too …
maybe I should try nvidia closed source driver again.
There is also the nvidia-open package:
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/nvidia-open/
Alternatively for the Turing (NV160/TUXXX) series or newer the nvidia-open package may be installed for open source kernel modules on the linux kernel (On other kernels nvidia-open-dkms must be used).
I switched to that – still have problems with Wayland, but plan to run with this driver on X11 for now.
I think the Wayland problem is confusion between Radeon and Nvidia graphics or something AMD-related.
Chris C. reported success on two Intel/Nvidia systems with KDE 6 + Wayland.
today I tried switching from nouveau to nvidia drivers and they worked fine too.
❯ lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1)
Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB]
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
Thanks, all this is pointing to an AMD issue …
Plasma 6.2
Looks pretty good!
One issue I ran into is my external monitor was resetting to 100% brightness every time I logged in. Turns out, brightness of this monitor is now controlled by KDE:
Being curious, I wanted to now how these settings were communicated between the computer and display:
https://www.ddcutil.com/displayport/
It appears HDMI and DVI used I2C, where DisplayPort has its own protocol.