KDE 6 Upgrade Broke Fonts in Wayland

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1

Hi all,

After upgrading to KDE six just after it came out, I’ve sorted out almost all the new bugs with one exception: my fonts (inconsistently) look terrible in certain places.

I’m using KDE 6, Arch Linux, on a thinkpad t480s. As the t480s has a HiDPI monitor, the desktop is set to 150% zoom. I use the wayland session by default.

Interestingly, the font rendering problem goes away completely in the X11 session. I can’t really say why, as the buggy font is present in both native plasma desktop applications/widgets, rather than just electron apps or native X apps being broken.

Edit: (Apologies, it seems I cannot post multiple images. Imgur should suffice hopefully “://imgur.com/a/ltJ1WWL”. There are multiple images posted there, each displaying a broken wayland image, a ‘normal’ X11 image, or my general font settings.)

Edit 2: It seems that even links are disabled. The above link has been edited but will need the “https” added back onto it. I will append one image here.

wallpapers
wallpapers548×838 222 KB

Note how the fonts on the left are broken, but not on the right.

The custom icon theme has no bearing on the fonts, and font rendering is the same if I disable it.

2

I noticed today that MELD now sucks on Plasma Wayland, but runs fine on X11.

System Info

Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.0.2
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.0.0
Qt Version: 6.6.2
Kernel Version: 6.8.1-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 15.0 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Product Name: B550M Steel Legend

Screenshot_20240330_201253
Screenshot_20240330_2012531920×1080 149 KB

Is this a bug, or is it a remnant of previous configs?

The plot thickens - logging in with a TEST user, I got this:

Test User
Test User1920×1080 97 KB

So this looks like something which I didn’t clean up properly after upgrading.

Sadly, this is not something contained in the Home folder, I tried moving everything out - and the issue remains… but NOT with a TEST user!

Update:
I found some weird things out. Launching Meld from terminal was fine, I entered my ~/.local/share/applications folder and looked at the launcher - deleted that and everything’s fine.

The issue was probably launching with GTK Portal… so there you go, OP - probably take a look at cleaning out more junk from before your upgrade…

Screenshot_20240330_211116
Screenshot_20240330_2111161395×440 55.9 KB

3

A complete throw in the dark here.
Those font “artifacts” looks EXACTLY like trying to run harwdare accelerated GPU without support for it. (for example using hardware acceleration in firefox without having it set up correctly)
Just a wild hunch, take it or leave it. :heart:

4

what a GTK4 heresy!

Real KDE users use Kompare or Kdiff3 :sunglasses: :+1:

3 Likes
5

Lolz yes, actually it’s an old launcher - not sure why that affects ‘open with…’.
org.gnome.Meld.desktop

The relevant line, I believe, Exec=env GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 meld %F

Deleted the launcher - now it’s all hunky dory.

6

This is 479891 – Some text glyphs in QML software are mis-aligned or squished when using a fractional scale factor. It affects fractionally-scaled text. It’s looking like a Qt regression, which KDE contributors are working to fix upstream right now. Hopefully it’s resolved soon.

4 Likes
7

Oh noo, I was a fake user the whole time without knowing about it!
I will IMMEDIATELY adjust my incorrect way of handling diffs, thank you. xD :heart: :nerd_face: :melting_face:

$ sudo nano /etc/environment

- DIFFPROG=/usr/bin/meld
+ DIFFPROG=/usr/bin/kompare
1 Like
8

good job, now the more important one, remove the pamac GTK4 attrocity - insult to KDE. :smirk_cat:

9

Challenge accepted. xD
(or maybe not)

10

Thanks Nathan, good to know it’s not just me being half-mad lol. I’ll eagerly await work on it in future.

1 Like
11

Haha I don’t use Pamac much - but it’s good to include Flatpak options alongside AUR and repos…

12

This is (potentially) affecting the out-of-the-box experience for anyone using Plasma 6 on Wayland with fractional scaling, yet it took me 15+ minutes to figure out that this was a known bug.

I wonder whether there is a way we can make “common” issues more visible for users, and whether Discuss could be a hub for that, like adding a “known bug” tag to a thread and making it “sticky”?

13

I use fractional scaling and notice I can read with less strain using X11 vs Wayland. The font rendering is not as good on Wayland on my setup. Also, I don’t have a dedicated GPU, just built-in Intel graphics. I say that in response to this:

“Those font “artifacts” looks EXACTLY like trying to run hardware accelerated GPU without support for it. (for example using hardware acceleration in firefox without having it set up correctly).”

14

Have you tried setting export QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY=RoundPreferFloor?
No idea if that’s related or if it’s a fundumental Kwin/X11/Wayland thing, but it’s worth a try I guess.

(The above is how to solve the thread’s original issue, might be related, might be irrelevant.)