14 DAY TRIAL // The adoption of the next-generation Wayland display server amongst Linux-based operating systems is slowly, but surely, changing the Linux world for better.
While most of the popular GNU/Linux distributions out there are shy on adopting Wayland by default, major Linux desktop environments like GNOME and KDE continue to offer improved Wayland support with each new major release.
KDE Plasma 5.13 is being worked on these days, and KDE developer Roman Gilg reported over the weekend on the progress, so far, on the Plasma Wayland component for the next major release, which looks to be pretty promising.
One of the most significant changes implemented in Plasma Wayland for KDE Plasma 5.13 is the ability to run more Linux apps on the Wayland display manager, either as native Wayland clients or as Xwayland clients.
"Let us start with a small change, but with huge implications: the decision to not set the environment variable QT_QPA_PLATFORM to wayland anymore in Plasma’s startup script," explains Roman Gilg. "One drawback is that this now applies to all Qt-based applications."
Mice configuration under Wayland, support for screencast apps
Other major Wayland improvements coming to the KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment is the ability to use screencast apps for screen recording and sharing, as well as to configure your mouse using a brand-new system settings module.
It would also appear that KDE Plasma 5.13 users will be able to adjust the colors and overall gamma of their monitors individually, and, with the recent support for xdg-output to KWayland and KWin, fractional scaling on Wayland is one step closer to reality.
While there's still a lot of work to be done for the KDE Plasma desktop environment to work out-of-the-box on the Wayland display server, these improvements are more than welcome, and you'll be able to take them for a test drive in the beta release next month.
According to the official release schedule, the KDE Plasma 5.13 beta is expected to land on May 17, and the final release should hit the streets on June 12, 2018. Unfortunately, KDE Plasma 5.13 is a short-lived branch supported until September 2018.
