Monthly Archives: May 2022

KDE Plasma and Wayland: usability

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It looks like KDE Plasma is getting usable with Wayland!

This is my current testing environment for this blog post:

Operating System: EndeavourOS
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.94.0
Qt Version: 5.15.4
Kernel Version: 5.15.41-1-lts (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz
Memory: 15,3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620

I had tested KDE Plasma with Wayland in the past, and the main problem I was experiencing, which made it unusable to me, was that I had to scale the display. I could scale the display, but the main problem was that, while KDE applications looked nice, the GTK applications looked blurred. This problem is still there, as you can see from this screenshot (here, I scaled the display to 150%):

You can see that the System settings dialog and Dolphin (in the background) look nice, but the EndeavourOS Welcome app and Firefox (in the background), which are GTK applications, look blurred!

Thus, I tried another way: I went back to 100% Display and tried to work on the Font HDPI scaling, though Plasma discourages doing that (it suggests using the display scaling). I tried with both 120 and 140 the result is satisfactory, as you can see from these screenshots:

IMPORTANT: You have to log out and log in to apply these changes. At least, I had to do that in my experiments.

There’s still one caveat to solve: GTK4 applications, like Gedit (the Gnome text editor) and Eye of Gnome (the Gnome image viewer), which, in this version of EndeavourOS, are already provided in their 42 version (using libadwaita). These applications are not considering font scaling. To solve that, you have to install Gnome Tweaks and adjust the “Scaling Factor” from there. Then, everything works also for those applications (Gedit is the one with “Untitled Document 1,” and Eye of Gnome is the dark window in the foreground):

With the Wayland session in Plasma, you can enjoy the default touchpad gestures (which, at the moment, are not configurable):

  • 4 Finger Swipe Left –> Next Virtual Desktop.
  • 4 Finger Swipe Right –> Previous Virtual Desktop.
  • 4 Finger Swipe Up –> Desktop Grid.
  • 4 Finger Swipe Down –> Available Window Grid.

Moreover, the scrolling speed for the touchpad can be configured (while, on X11, I wasn’t able to):

There are still a few strange things happening: the splash screen has the title bar and window buttons if you start Eclipse! 😀

I’ll try to experiment with this configuration also in other distributions.

Let’s cross our fingers! 😉

Dropbox and Gnome 42

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Now that Gnome 42 has been released and available in most Linux distributions, I started experiencing problems with the Dropbox icon in the system tray.

First of all, I have no problem with Ubuntu 22.04, which comes with the extension “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support” https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/. Moreover, I think the problem is not there because, while Ubuntu 22.04 ships Gnome 42, it still ships Nautilus in version 41.

In Fedora and EndeavourOS, I usually install the same extension in the Gnome DE, and it has been working quite well.

Unfortunately, with Gnome 42 (provided by Fedora 36 and currently by EndeavourOS), I started experiencing problems, even with the extension above installed and activated.

If you had already installed Dropbox in your Gnome 41 DE and upgraded to Gnome 42 (e.g., you upgraded Fedora 35 to Fedora 36 after installing Dropbox), the icon is clickable. Still, you get a context menu always saying “Connecting…”

At least you can access “Preferences…”.

However, suppose you had never installed Dropbox in that Gnome 42 environment. In that case, the icon in the system tray appears (again, after installing the above extension), but no matter how you click on that, no context menu appears at all. That’s a disgrace because you cannot access Dropbox preferences, like “selective sync” (you have to use the command line, as I suggested in the previous post).

Instead of the extension “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support” (disable it if you had already activated that), you can use the extension “Tray Icons: Reloaded,” https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/. Install it, activate it, logout and login, and now the context menu works as expected:

Remember that this extension does not seem to support all system tray icons. For example, Variety does not seem to be supported.

At least you can use this extension to set up Dropbox (e.g., selective sync) and then go back to the previous extension!

Testing the new Fedora 36

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Fedora 36 has just been released, and I couldn’t resist trying it right away. I had already started using Fedora 35 daily (though I have several Linux distributions installed), and I’ve been enjoying it so far.

Before upgrading my Fedora 35 installations, I decided to install Fedora 36 on a virtual machine with VirtualBox.

These are a few screenshots of the installation procedure.

As usual, you’re greeted by a dialog for installing or trying Fedora, and I went for the latter.

The installation procedure is available from the dock:

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of the Fedora installer: compared to other installers like Ubuntu and EndeavourOS or Manjaro, I find the Fedora installer much more confusing. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to such an installer, but I never had problems with Calamares in EndeavourOS or Manjaro, not even the very first time I tried Calamares.

For example, once a subsection is selected, the button “Done” is at the upper left corner, why I would expect buttons at the bottom (right).

I appreciate that you can select the NTP server time synchronization (at my University, I cannot use external NTP servers, and in fact, the default one is not working: I have to use the one provided by my University). Unfortunately, this setting does not seem to be persisted in the installed system. UPDATE 12/May: Actually it is persisted: I thought I’d find it in the file /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf but instead it is in /etc/chrony.conf. Well done!

Since I’m installing the system on a VM hard disk for the partitioning, I chose the “Automatic” configuration. On a real computer, I’d go for manual partitioning. Even in this task, the Fedora installer is a bit confusing. Maybe the “Advanced Custom (Blivet GUI)” is more accessible than the default “Custom” GUI, or, at least, it’s much similar to what I’m accustomed to.

Finally, we’re ready to start the installation.

Even on a virtual machine, the installation does not take that long.

Once rebooted (actually, in the virtual machine, the first reboot did not succeed, and I had to force the shutdown of the VM), you’re greeted by a Welcome program. This program allows you to configure a few things, including enabling 3rd party repositories and online accounts and specifying your user account.

Then, there is the Gnome welcome tour, which I’ll skip here.

Here is the information about the installed system. As you can see, Fedora ships with the brand new Gnome 42 and with Wayland by default:

Fedora uses offline updates, so once notified of updates, you have to restart the system, and the updates will be installed on the next boot:

The installation is not bloated with too much software. Gnome 42 new theme looks fine, with folder icons in blue (instead of the old-fashioned light brown). Fedora also ships with the new Gnome Text Editor. Differently from the old Gedit, the new text editor finally allows you to increase/decrease the font size with Ctrl and +/-, respectively. I cannot believe Gedit did not provide such a mechanism. I used to install Kate in Gnome because I was not too fond of Gedit for that missing feature.

Instead, Fedora does not install the new Gnome terminal (gnome-console) by default. I installed that with DNF, and I wouldn’t say I liked it that much: with Ctrl +/-, you can zoom the terminal’s font, but the terminal does not resize accordingly. For that reason, I prefer to stay with the good old Gnome terminal (gnome-terminal).

First impressions

First of all, although I tried this installation in a VM, Fedora 36 seems pretty responsive and efficient. I might even say that the guest Fedora 36 VM looked faster than my host (Ubuntu 22.04). Maybe that was just an impression 😉

Since I chose the Automatic partitioning, Fedora created two BTRFS subvolumes (one for / and one for /home) with compression, and a separate ext4 /boot partition:

It also uses swap on zram:

I soon installed the extension “AppIndicator, KStatusNotifierItem and legacy Tray icons support to the Shell” by Ubuntu (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/) and it works in Gnome 42.

However, after installing Dropbox, while the icon shows on the system tray, clicking on that Dropbox icon (left or right-click or double-click) does not make the context menu appear, making that unusable. I seem to understand that it is a known problem, and maybe they are already working on that. For the time being, if you need the Dropbox context menu for settings like “selective sync,” you’re out of luck. However, you can use the dropbox command-line program for the settings. In that case, I first ignore all the folders and then remove the exclusion for the folders I want to have in sync.

For example, I only want “Screenshot” and “sync” from my Dropbox on my local computer, and I run:

On a side note, I find the Dropbox support for Linux a kind of an insult…

I look forward to upgrading my existing Fedora 35 installations on my computers, and maybe I’ll get back with more impressions on Fedora 36 on real hardware.

For the moment, it looks promising 🙂