Tux Machines

On the Road to Plasma 6, Cont’d

Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Aug 08, 2023

A little over two months ago I involuntarily switched my daily driver laptop to a Plasma 6 development build (see this blog post on how that went). Since then there has been stunning progress on ironing out bugs, tidying things up, and implementing new features. Let me show you what I’ve been working on, stumbling blocks to look out for, and what you can do to help to make Plasma 6 a truly great release!

A couple of weeks ago I actually finally switched to a Plasma Wayland session full time and it’s been working great! This now also means I have to fix all of my pet peeve bugs, and boy did I!

I noticed several things that were missing or behaved differently from my X11 session. For instance, task manager showed not only an application’s main window but also any popup (for instance, the “really quit?” or “save or discard?” prompts). That’s because the handling of so-called transient windows in libtaskmanager hasn’t been implemented for Wayland yet. Not only does it have to hide child windows but must in turn propagate any “needs attention” state (glowing orange) back to its parent so it won’t go unnoticed. There is also a dialog protocol in the works so we can tag modal windows and darken their respective parent window accordingly.

Read on