Hello! I am a long-time KDE Plasma user, and I am preparing for the release of Plasma 6. I use Nvidia-Settings to set up a super resolution for two of my monitors. I then have to disable K-Screen as the xorg.conf file that is created by nvidia-settings is completely ignored by Plasma if I do not disable K-Screen.
I know most people in the community probably do not know this, but Gnome and Cinnamon have an equivalent plugin for a purpose such as this (K-Screen). They have plugins, whereas we have background service called K-Screen. Recently, Gnome and Cinnamon have disabled the ability to disable their version of ‘K-Screen’ (I know in Cinnamon it was called Cinnamon-Setting-Deamon-Xrandr). So if a person uses Gnome or Cinnamon, they cannot force the desktop environment to use xorg.conf.
My question is, will Plasma 6 still have the ability to disable K-Screen and will that force KDE to still use the values from xorg.conf? I am asking this as I have to prepare for this, incase it does not. Currently my monitor setup is:
1680x1050 (Left)
2560x1440 (Middle)
1920x1200 (Right)
I use Nvidia Setting to bring the left and right monitors up to 2307x1440. Will I still be able to disable K-Screen in Plasma 6, and force the desktop environment to read from xorg.conf?
You can still disable KScreen in Plasma 6 on X11. Note that you’re 100% on your own when you do this; don’t submit bug reports about multi-monitor stuff being broken, because it’s your responsibility to make it work the way you want.
However in Plasma 6 Wayland, KWin has taken over from KScreen and its management of the screens cannot be turned off. But your approach of manually generating xorg.conf files does not work on Wayland anyway, so nothing will have been lost.
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Hello Sir! I am glad that you responded. I am a big fan!
So in Wayland, we already have fractional scaling. A person will most likely never need to disable Kwin anyway. Right now, my current workflow doesn’t allow me to use Wayland 100% as Unity, Godot, and the Jetbrain IDEs do not work well under XWayland on Nvidia. For anyone else who might be interested, if someone wishes to disable Kwin to manage screens themselves in Wayland, can they actually do that?
Also, I have yet to encounter a multi-monitor problem after disabling K-Screen. Anyway, sir, thank you so much for your reply.
You’re welcome. No, it’s not possible to disable KWin’s management of screens in Plasma 6 on Wayland.
What issues are you having with those apps on Wayland? I’m curious.
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I can actually make a video about it if you want. i want to help as much as possible.
You see, I am a video game developer. My current setup, as I have mentioned above, forces me to use 110% (left), 150% (middle), 125% (right), on Wayland. All the issues that I will list now are not Wayland problems, I think. They are probably due to Nvidia Drivers.
- Unity Engine’s Inspector does not refresh sometimes when the game is running. This can make testing inspector variables extremely hard. In fact, I nearly lost a project as I was trying to fix a movement bug in one of my games that wasn’t even there. Just moving the Unity Engine’s window refreshed the inspector.
- When resizing tabs on Unity Engine, there is a weird blinking effect on most of the windows inside the Unity Engine. This is similar to the blinking effect that we get or a 3D accelerated application not being updated when KDE compositor on X11 is turned off and on. Unity Engine runs on OpenGL by the way.
- Godot 3 and Godot 4 UI is laggy. Super laggy in fact. When i try to click a button on the interface, I sometimes have to click it three times on Wayland to make the engine respond. Godot 3 UI is very unresponsive, to the point of being almost unsuable. Godot 4, the UI is slightly more responsive, but multi window issues exist. In fact, when any other window opens inside Godot 4, the rest of it goes black, except for the window that was opened.
- Due to the unresponsiveness in Wayland, Godot’s built in script editor sometimes takes about 1 second to respond to clicks. So I am forced to use VS Code to write code in that.
- All the Jetbrain IDEs appear blurry under fractional scaling.
- OBS captures are always blurry and lack the quality that I get on X11 and Windows 10.
- There is a bug in Audacity on Wayland. The little bar that appears on Audacity to tell which part of the clip it is playing does not appear at all.
- Shotcut becomes unresponsive on Wayland when new clips are added for a while. The UI is also not very responsive and suffers from the weird going black for a few milliseconds when windows are resized inside it. Dragging clips to the timeline sometimes crashes Shotcut as well.
- On Unity, windows open on my left-most screen almost all the time, even though Unity itself is in the middle.
- Unity sometimes forces focus and brings itself forward when I am writing code in Jetbrains Rider and use Ctrl+S to save code.
- Dragging Firefox for the first time makes the mouse go to the top left corner of the window and that is where the drag begins.
These are just some of the problems that I am encountering, that I can remember. As a game developer, I can be off service to the KDE team to test game dev tools (the popular ones) on my Nvidia card, on EndeavorOS. I know you use Fedora these days (Tech Over Tea), but I have found Plasma to be super stable on Endeavor.
There are still some bugs in Plasma 5 which I have already posted about. The one that I have not posted about is the Spectacle Bug that occurs when Global Scale is increased in X11. This was a problem in Wayland (monitors would kind of morph into each other when a rectangular section was selected).
Then there is an issue with Kbackup shrinking for no reason on Wayland when a backup is being created.
That’s a lot of good stuff; I’d recommend starting a new topic about it, since this topic has already marked as resolved.
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