Plasma/5.5 Errata

Known issues in the Plasma 5.5 release.

Intel GPUs

We have received many reports on problems with running Plasma on hardware with graphic cards provided by Intel. We are sorry for the inconvenience and are sorry that we are not able to provide a product which is on par on all systems. Our aim is it to have our software run well on all hardware, but we cannot prevent errors in the underlying stack. Our software was hit by surprise by the issues which are from our view regressions in the underlying driver stack as previous versions worked fine. We would have liked to provide workarounds for these issues which can only be fixed by Intel. Unfortunately we were not able to find a satisfying solution. Given that we present here a list of known workaround which can be tried by affected users.

We encourage our users who experience problems to come to forum.kde.org so that we can help with our knowledge and to help us gather more information to provide better workarounds.

Random application crashes

This issue is caused by a driver bug. A reported workaround is to change AccelMethod to UXA in the xorg configuration and restarting the system. Please refer to documentation provided by your distribution on how to change this.

Heavy rendering artifacts

Users told us that enabling DRI3 in xorg configuration can circumvent this problem. An alternative can be to use the new OpenGL ES backend in KWin which also seems to circumvent the problem or disable compositing completely.

KWin Wayland

Integration features in Plasma still missing or incomplete (e.g. Pager applet, task manager)
Window decorations provided by Qt are limited in functionality
No support for xdg_shell which means GTK+ applications cannot be started on Wayland
No Drag and Drop Support
No Copy/Paste from X11 to Wayland windows and vice versa
Mouse cursor doesn't update correctly
Mouse cursor sometimes with an offset
No support for animated mouse cursors (Qt Bug 48181)
XWayland doesn't remove outputs (Freedesktop Bug 92914)
XWayland older than 1.18 lacks features, no touch, no updates on screen hot plug
Several effects break multi-screen rendering
Focus follows mouse not yet implemented
Move/resize windows through modifier key is not supported
No focus stealing prevention for Wayland windows
No window rules support for Wayland windows
Screen configuration only partially implemented
~~Running a Wayland session will require re-compiling kinit (KDE Bug 356580)~~ (Fixed in 5.5.1)

Beta

Plasma Media Center is in tech preview and misses features compared to Plasma Media Center 1

Missing features

No holidays or calendar events displayed in the Plasma calendar until KDE Frameworks 5.17, due for release shortly after Plasma 5.5.0
KWin does not provide window tabs
Tooltips on window decoration buttons
KUrlRequester freezes UI when its dialog is opened for the second time Bug 351516

Configuration changes

Environment variables and shutdown scripts are now sourced from ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env and ~/.config/plasma-workspace/shutdown, respectively. Existing scripts from Plasma 4 should be moved there.