Using Libreoffice Writer from the Fedora repository. Using Fedora 43 with KDE, but both Wayland and X11 show same symptom. Currently on 6.18.16-200.fc43.x86_64 kernel but same symptom also on previous kernels. Disabling smooth scrolling, or enabling it, didn’t make a difference.
Here’s the problem. Highlighting text with mouse, holding left button and dragging down, selects current screen but then no further for a few seconds, then jumps down x lines, stalls, another x lines. Not down a page, or down a paragraph or down a discernible pattern. Seems to happen on any document that is more than one screen long.
Several others on the Fedora forum are complaining about the same thing. I don’t understand how such a serious problem as this hasn’t attracted some attention. Similar posts going back years.
It’s true - the mouse is ok on-screen, but when it comes to pulling down to scroll/select it’s really janky.
I forgot this issue, if I’m only using the mouse, I’ll click to put the cursor where I want to start, then scroll and then Shift click to select up to the finishing point - the alternative is to hold ⇧Shift and use Pgup/Dn and arrows to scroll instead…
But yes, dragging a selection beyond the visible area leads to really horrible and janky selection.
This, I believe, is an issue between LibreOffice and Plasma on Wayland.
Scrolling can get extremely laggy or just freeze…
The “back-end” LibreOffice uses to talk to KDE (the kf5 or kf6 plugin) doesn’t handle smooth scrolling well…
What if you select text with the keyboard but across pages. i.e. Hold Shift and use the arrow keys to select text? Does the same buffering symptom occur?
If you just use the keyboard, it doesn’t ‘scroll’ but instead jumps by about 1/4 screen when you go beyond the last line… and the same with PgUp/Dn - you can select text that way, but no smooth scroll there.
It’s not really a ‘buffering’ thing - it ONLY happens if you’re selecting by dragging the mouse - it just stops at the end of a page and - try it yourself - it’s hardly ‘scrolling’ at all.
However, if you set your cursor, it will scroll smoothly to your end point where you can press Shift and click to select all between… you just can’t drag it.
Many sources say it’s a qt6 problem with Writer on Wayland, but after looking at some fixes, and also trying it on X11 - the same issue occurs for me… trying it with qt5 and GTK also fails.
It also appears a distinct issue with LibreOffice… one would expect (as with Firefox) the scroll to be smooth with a speed related to how far you pull the mouse past the boundary.
Then this is likely a Plasma 6 issue. It occurs also with Flatpak, and both Wayland and X11.
It occurs with a change from qt6 to qt5 to GTK, though I stopped troubleshooting at extreme measures - so these possibly just didn’t change anything (i.e. if you open Help, About, it tells you the interface is VCL: kf6 (cairo+wayland) but changing those failed…
This is why I haven’t noticed it. When I do use the mouse I’ve always held the LMB so text is selected, and scrolled with the mouse scroll button (instead of dragging off the edge of the application).
I can see what you mean though, selecting text that way is quite janky and not smooth at all. To me it acts like a screen buffer issue. It appears LibreOffice has to load the next block of text rather than it already being rendered off screen.
That’s absolutely not normal, as with any text editing…
Home ⇒ start of line, End ⇒ end of line…
Hold Ctrl and they go Start and End of document…
They’re the most basic standard/legacy text editing shortcuts.
Thanks - I started to think I was the odd one out with the SHIFT and keyboard navigation, I like a more controlled technique - though I can’t deny that if it’s smooth and not too fast, the drag 'n scroll wouldn’t be so bad.
In Firefox it’s a bit fast, so I generally don’t do it much in forum edit windows either.
Check your keyboard shortcut definitions in KDE system settings aren’t in conflict. And also double check the LibreOffice settings under Tools/Customise/Keyboard.