This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pointieststick.com/2024/04/12/this-week-in-kde-explicit-sync/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pointieststick.com/2024/04/12/this-week-in-kde-explicit-sync/
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If you preferred the old style of app launching in Plasma’s traditional Task Manager widget whereby an app’s pinned launcher would disappear when launched, you can now get that back
Awesome! I was missing that since upgrading to Plasma 6 
System Monitor now shows a tooltip with the full text when you hover over an elided piece of text in one of the table views
This is always good with translations which have longer text.
the clipboard menu that appears when you hit
Meta+V
I never knew about the existence of this menu! I’ll now make use of it, instead of always going to the clipboard applet.
Great stuff as always!
If I’m right this “explicit sync” is the cause of flickering of software like Steam.
I’ve read that Plasma 6.1 should fix this.
If, after update Plasma, I still have this issue…what should I check in order to debug it?
- Do you have a NVIDIA GPU?
- Are you running the NVIDIA 555 Beta drivers? You need to be running those drivers for the issue to go away. The stable drivers that implement explicit sync should be out…soon.
oh…sorry… yes, I’ve an Nvidia… 4080.
About the driver…at the moment I’m not at that PC but I’m on the default driver version provided by Neon, and regularly updated as requested…
If I have to choose about the beta, how should I do it?
Or probably it’s better to use the stable release, considering that, due to some graphic pen issues with Wayland, I have to wait for Plasma 6.2?
My understanding is that 6.1 implements explicit sync. It needed to be implemented all across the stack; in KDE, in NVIDIA’s drivers, and in xwayland. So far it’s in KDE and in xwayland, but not NVIDIA’s stable drivers yet.
I’m using the stable drivers and waiting for the newest stable release, which I hope will be out in a few weeks. It should be here long before Plasma 6.2 is out.
As for getting the Beta drivers on Neon, I’m not sure how.
Do you get flickering even on X11? It should only happen on the Wayland session AFAIK.
Just on Wayland and I’ve just quickly tried with Steam as I remember that it was affected by this…
On X11 everything is fine so I’ll continue to use it as soon as everything will be fixed.
If you want to use Steam on Wayland, turn off hardware acceleration in Steam’s settings. It reduced the flickering greatly for me. It used to be really bad.
As soon as the stable 555/560 driver is out, this flickering issue should finally be fixed. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been excited about a driver update.
Thank you for the suggestion.
I think I’ll wait for the new driver releases.
I’ve been watching the nvidia linux forum threads on 555, and still seems a basketcase. It seems to have fixed xorg flickering, but broke everything else. I was hoping to get on plasma 6.1 and 555 to actually have wayland usable finally, but I’ve been holding off updating arch until something gives with nvidia.
This will certainly be the last Nvidia GPU I own, finally AMD is more common in laptops and open drivers better than anything Nvidia will ever achieve at this point. I’m tired of waiting for nvidia to un-fsck the gpu drivers for linux, and they’re too busy with AI to care anymore now.
Well, Arch still doesn’t have 555 in its repositories. Unless you’re using the Beta driver.
I’m hoping Nova + NVK + Zink + Vulkan Video (i.e. h264 hardware decode/encode) will mean the end of my suffering. Really, it can’t be that much worse than the proprietary drivers. I’ll take them for a test drive early next year, I think…