EndeavourOS is moving to KDE Plasma for its live environment and offline installer from Xfce. You’ll hear no complaints from me!
What big update? Wayland has been pretty usable (on AMD, anyway) for a while now.
Presumably Plasma 6.0, which will fix a large number of remaining Wayland issues via Qt 6.
Will that make it more usable for nvidia users? I hope to someday try SteamOS with nvidia but I think most of the wayland issues are what’s preventing that.
EOS and KDE are basically what SteamOS is running on the back-end. They use Plasma as their DE, and they use Arch as their OS. It’s just highly tailored to their hardware since it’s all AMD-based and AMD drivers have been open source forever.
There are offshoot projects that build from the SteamOS source and then include Nvidia drivers, but I haven’t found one that was as functional as just running Endeavor and customizing it in the way that a Steam Deck would be designed for gaming.
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia for KDE specifically, see bottom of https://arewewaylandyet.com/ for others
Will that make it more usable for nvidia users?
Don’t bet on it. For a while NVidia had hired a guy to implement EGLStreams support in KWin and other issues around supporting the Nvidia driver but since a year he’s gone: https://invent.kde.org/users/ekurzinger/activity
It’s not great on Nvidia. KDE’s dev team have announced a big Plasma update, specifically focused on Wayland support to be released around February.
I have a 3090 and some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t. I am forced to use it because X will lock refresh rates to the rate of the lowest monitor, so my 165hz screens were not being used to their fullest until I swapped over to Wayland which supports multiple monitor refresh rates.
Often I will find system components freezing up. The task bar, for example, will often stop being useable and freeze up. I have had the digital clock widget freeze up on me, which requires a relog to fix. It also doesn’t totally work on transparent themes, rendering them without the translucency.
The task bar, for example, will often stop being useable and freeze up. I have had the digital clock widget freeze up on me, which requires a relog to fix.
Thankfully this has been tracked down, and will be fixed for Plasma 6. If you run into it, you can hit Alt+F2 and run kwin_wayland --replace which will restart the shell.
If you go into edit mode, and edit the task bar widget that shows your running applications, disable the option that shows window previews upon hovering over the application. Apparently that is the thing that causes the renderer to fail on non Intel GPU systems. Here’s the bug report that goes over the whole history if you’re interested.
Definitely feel you on the overall Nvidia Wayland KDE issues. I really wish I was in a position to be able to pickup an AMD GPU.
