Tried Wayland again today under Plasma to test the current status. GTK programs like Firefox still ignore the Plasma window decoration and force their own GTK stuff. Looks terrible. Considering that so many are happy with the development of Wayland in Plasma, especially since it’s supposed to become standard in Plasma in a few months, I get scared. In Firefox, using a different theme (not the standard theme) helps in this respect, but then again the buttons are disproportionately large. Or have I done something wrong?
I don’t know what you mean by more precise. I have installed the plasma-wayland-session in Plasma, activated Wayland (on new login) and Firefox no longer accepts the Plasma window decoration. If I use a different theme (light or dark mode, for example), the Plasma window decoration appears again in the title bar, but the proportions of the buttons are oversized.
The reason for what you’re describing is called “client-side decorations”, or CSD for short. What this means is that the window decorations — including the window operations buttons — are drawn and managed by the applications themselves, as opposed to by the window manager, which is known as server-side decorations.
GTK has defaulted to CSD ever since the gtk3 generations, and Wayland as a display server also defaults to CSD.
I do not know whether the following will help — and if it does, then it’ll only work on gtk3 applications, not on GTK4 — but I myself have solved the inconsistency in the window decorations between gtk and qt a long time ago by installing gtk3-nocsd-git from the AUR. But then again, I’m still on X11, not on Wayland, and I don’t know whether it works there. I also don’t have any GTK4 stuff installed. But you could give it a try…
Just because Plasma 6 will be officially released in February does not mean it will be adopted right away.
Historically, the first new Plasma releases have always been extremely buggy and lacking in functionality that was already long available in the outgoing releases, plus that Plasma 5.27 is an LTS release and will continue being supported upstream for a while still after the release of Plasma 6.
Even then still, just because KDE officially releases Plasma 6 does not mean it would be replacing 5.27 in Arch right away, testimonial of which the explicit renaming of a number of Plasma/KDE-related packages in the repositories, and then there’s still the step from Arch Unstable via Arch Testing to Arch Stable, and from there into Manjaro Stable via the Unstable and Testing branches.
In the aftermath of the 5.25 fiasco, I am also hoping that @philm will have the wisdom this time to keep the Plasma 6 packages separate from the (already renamed) Plasma 5 packages, so that those of us who prefer sticking with Plasma 5.27 LTS for a while longer still would be able to do so.
Lastly, Plasma 6 will be using Wayland by default on new installations, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be able to run on top of X11 anymore — quite the contrary even, as KDE have stated that they are still going to continue supporting Plasma 6 on X11, and that they only plan dropping X11 support in Plasma 7, which is still years away.
Just for the sake of order: Is a sudo pacman -Rns plasma-wayland-session sufficient for removal, or is there something else to do (files in /home or something)?
Your home directory should not normally require any maintenance after removing Wayland, because qt applications are supposedly able to detect the underlying display server on the fly and run in the required mode.
