KDE 6 - Wayland broken Chrome/Vivaldi

I have just gotten the KDE 6 wayland update and have a few major breaking issues.

  1. After installation then Vivaldi and Chrome starts flicking. I have Nvidia 545 driver installed and do not have this issue in X11.

It is a breaking thing and I’ve tried to figure out if I can run the browsers with parameters or disable hardware acceleration etc. but nothing makes them stop blinking - which makes them unusable.

  1. Text input is delayed or missing sometimes. Sometimes the text input is delayed with seconds so entering text while the browser is black makes it semi impossible to send keyboard shortcuts and “keep on working” because letters might be missing.

  2. krunner isn’t starting up automatically and is crashing until started manually from the K-menu. This is a breaking thing.

I can’t start a X11 session - it just lingers in the logo session and never enters plasma.
I’ve even tried to create a new user to start over from scratch to eliminate a custom config that my default user might have - it does not change anything.

Is there a way to fix this or rollback the KDE 6 rollout - this resembles the KDE 4 release, but at least browsers worked back then… this is unusable.

Noticed the same. I use Chrome just for banking. Every time I did a transfer Chrome was hiccuping. Not a huge problem in my case but still not an enjoyable experience. Meanwhile, Firefox crashes like crazy every time I go into KDE Settings, Discover, or otherwise get up too much while Firefox is open. Have made countless crash reports to Mozilla due to Firefox crashing.

Before this update, I had a rock solid system. If 6.0 being the first release of a major new upgrade was expected to be buggy, there should have been a clear warning about this. Until this I had expected stable and well-tested software from KDE.

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Same here - Neon has been rock solid for years, and I’ve been using it since the begining (and KDE since the begining as well (I’m old)).

This KDE 6/Wayland update resembles the KDE 4 release with way too many things that have not been vetted. I don’t mind testing out and being on bleeding edge, but Wayland just isn’t ready yet.

I’m sorry to say that I tried a re-install yesterday and the problem persisted.
My GPU is a Nvidia 2080S and could in X11 play CSGO and CS2 with ~250-300 fps without a problem and no crashing apps, but in Wayland browsers crash, settings don’t stay and the applications flicker.

I’ll be following this KDE 6/Wayland progress, but until then I’ll be using another distro that does KDE 5.x.

On a side note then everything in Wayland looks like it is smudged just a tiny bit vs X11 that is crisp.

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NEWS FLASH there are ALWAYS issues when a new release is rolled out. Maybe next time actually do a bit of research.

My laptop and desktop got update notifications at approx the same time (laptop first) so I updated that and then the desktop after the laptop had rebooted - just to be safe as it got a lot of KDE 5.27 updates, which sometimes breaks things. But the desktop got KDE 6 and Wayland updates that I didn’t check the updates as the 2 are usually in sync, so I didn’t expect to get 2 vastly/extremely different updates at so close intervals.

Perhaps a fullscreen, in red, warning should have been posted by Discover to say “This is a major update - it may break things and we fully know that Wayland isn’t fully supportd by all software yet - Ye be warned !!!”.

But all in all thanks for your awe inspiring and insight full comment that really helps the rest of us, it is much appreciated, it is really helping us resolve our issues.

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I have similar problem with Wayland, specifically while I’m watching a video with Youtube, Vivaldi starts flashing, but it doesn’t occur with Firefox. There are similar visual effects in minor scale, for example, flashing text while typing this message, sometimes on hints on TaskBar. Damn this seems Windows with its sh…t updates, my previous system was working fine… damn!!!

Those chromium/electron apps run fine in native wayland mode. Google search will show you how.

A google search gives me nothing on solving it. What do you search for? And how did you solve getting the desktop to even show after sddm login? Mine just lingers, then goes black screen with a smaller than normal mouse cursor.

Maybe hardware acceleration is disabled in firefox and not in Vivaldi?
Because that sounds exactly like if you try to use hardware acceleration while not having the correct driver support for it.

To test it, open firefox settings.
All the way near the bottom of “General” you find “Performance”.
Try disabling/enabling hardware acceleration and test the difference.

image

I think you need to restart firefox for it to take effect.

And then with that information (if there is a difference) maybe you can find a similar setting in Vivaldi and fix it that way.

Please post output of sudo ubuntu-drivers devices and sudo ubuntu-drivers list

This solved my problem:

  1. Go to vivaldi://flags in Vivaldi
  2. Search for Ozone, and localize setting Preferred Ozone platform
  3. Change the value Default to Auto,
  4. Ready!!

However, I returned to X11 because Wayland doesn’t work as expected with other apps and system itself.

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