The project KDE has lived a very busy year 2021 due to the endless migration of Kwin to Wayland, the graphical protocol that has become the greatest eternal promise of the Linux desktop. But new years, new goals (or maybe not so much), so Nate Graham has posted on your blog a summary or part of the roadmap of KDE Plasma by 2022.
To begin with, from the desktop environment they will continue polishing on those fronts where they still have to put things in order. For example, Nate Graham has recognized that language and format settings has so far been problematic because of overlap. Luckily, contributor Han Young is working to merge both sections and make appear on a single page. In this way, it would be clearer what is established in the system and, at the very least, it would make the possibility of incompatible configurations more difficult.
Another point that will be renewed are the Breeze icons, Breeze in English. Designer Ken Vermette is working on modernizing and enhancing the Color Breeze icon theme to round out and soften them, as well as removing ugly and old elements like long shadows. On the other hand, the monochrome icons will also be renewed, all with the intention that both icon themes look better combined with the colors of the system and therefore polish the aesthetic finish.
KDE is a project in charge of the development of a powerful software ecosystem from which Plasma stands out, its own desktop environment, so support in this sense is, of course, very important, especially considering the transition from Kwin to Wayland.
Setting the country formats in KDE Plasma.
KDE Plasma has greatly improved your experience with Wayland over the course of 2021, but it still has a long way to go to achieve parity with Xorg on a reliability level. In the project wiki there is published a list of obstacles that right now it is rather short, but that it is still open and adding new errors that are being reported. Nate Graham has explained here that the new bugs being reported are generally less serious than those in the past, showing progress in Kwin’s implementation of Wayland.
Continuing with Wayland, the well-known KDE developer recalled NVIDIA’s adoption of GBM, which has meant the green giant’s surrender to the standards driven by communities and willingly adopted by Intel and AMD. While GBM support was introduced in KDE Plasma version 5.23.2, it seems like it has a long way to go before it is fully functional.
Multi-monitor support will be one of the priorities in the current year 2022. The intention is to solve many of the problems that are still present. Steps were taken in this direction last year, but the developers of the desktop environment intend to give it a good boost. On the other hand, we have QtQuick’s inertial touch panel support, which should improve the experience with touchpads so typical of laptops.
KDE Plasma system information from a Wayland session.
Finally we have the plan to carry out a initiative called “15 minute bug”, which would consist of an effort to correct as many trivially detected errors during the first 15 minutes of basic use of the environment. For Nate Graham, these kinds of problems are what ultimately generate “Negative opinions remain in people’s minds and reinforce the perception that KDE software is buggy and unreliable”.
In short, and at least for Nate Graham, the priorities are to renew the aesthetic finish and polish the experience on various fronts, starting, of course, with the controversial Wayland. From MuyLinux we wish KDE a good year 2022 so that it continues to evolve as a project.
