 All right, so hello everyone, my name is Neil Gampa. I'm here as one of the members of the KDE SIG, and I want to talk to you about Fedora KDE and Fedora 34, for the Fedora Linux 34s, Fedora KDE stuff. So a little bit about who I am, open source advocate, contributor, patcher, maintainer, infesco, member of the board. I do DevOps-y things at Datto. I build and package things all over the place. But I think we're here mostly to talk about me as what I and other members of the KDE SIG have done for Fedora Linux 34. So to give an overview about Fedora KDE, it is produced by the Fedora KDE SIG, which packages and maintains the Qt stack and the KDE software ecosystem for Fedora, and RHEL, starting with RHEL 8. What we primarily produce is the KDE Plasma Edition, which is the main deliverable of the SIG, provides a curated experience to showcase KDE technologies on the Fedora Linux platform. So what's new with Fedora Linux 34? Well, we got Wayland by default. So we're leaping into the future here, and we've now provide KDE Plasma with the Plasma Wayland session by default. So instead of using the X11 stuff, we're actually running with Wayland as our default session. And this gives us a smoother graphics pipeline, and greater performance. Among other things, you might see things like the compositing being consistently applied across applications and things like that. I observed with a couple of games that I played that we now have like slightly higher frame rates, and the rendering is just crisper and cleaner. And without having the XORG server running in the background, it's actually slightly lighter on memory resources compared to the X11 session. So yeah, there's a lot of nice little benefits here. Hopefully for most people, it'll be relatively transparent, but this is a big step forward. And it was something that we worked very closely with the KDE project to make Plasma Wayland fantastic for our users. So another aspect of this is actually something that is a little bit less brought out in a bit, but I wanted to highlight it because it's super cool. So Plasma 521 introduces the Breeze Twilight theme, which blends dark panel elements with light application styles. And this is actually really good if you're interacting with applications that don't necessarily adhere to dark themes, but you wanna be able to have like a mostly dark UX. And so with Plasma 521 and in Fedora, Fedora Breeze, which is our just very light thing on top of the normal Breeze configuration, our look and feel has switched to Breeze Twilight. And so now, oh yeah, and some people mentioning the confusion about rel 8, like yes, we're providing it in Apple. It was removed from rel base in rel 8, and so now it is in Apple, and so the Fedora KDE manages it for rel users. But yeah, so, oh man, lost my train of thought. Sorry about that, but like this Breeze Twilight theme that we're now using, has two major benefits for us. It will provide you a more clean experience when you're working with applications, regardless of their queue or GTK, because the light application styles just work with both of them. And the dark panel elements make it so that they just kind of stop being in focus, so you can kind of focus on the work that you're doing in your applications, while still providing a traditional consistent user experience. And this kind of mirrors what some of the other spins and additions have been doing for their desktops, where they have dark elements, even if they have light application styles. And finally, we've introduced 64-bit ARM images. So we've always had images for ARM, but they were mostly for 32-bit stuff. Now with Fedora Linux 34, we now offer a live media ISO for UEFI-based systems and disk images for non-UEFI systems to be able to use. So if you're working with, for example, a Pinebook Pro or a Raspberry Pi, you can use these new 64-bit ARM images to run KDE Plasma on it. There were a lot of requests for this in the when I gave a talk about KDE Plasma in the Academy talk I did last year. And so I worked on having this added so that we could have these images for people to use. So that's kind of what's happened so far. And I want to talk a little bit about where we're going in the future. So on our bucket list, Fedora Kinoite is coming for Fedora 35. And that is an immutable desktop variant of the Fedora KDE Spin. If you're familiar with Fedora Silver Blue, this is, Fedora Kinoite is our variant of Silver Blue using the KDE Plasma desktop. And the idea here is that we would provide this as an alternative for people who want like a more consistent, simpler desktop experience. We've done work with the KDE project upstream to have Plasma Discover actually support RPMOS tree. And so we can now do updates through RPMOS tree for in the desktop environment. So which was pretty much a prerequisite for being able to do this. Obviously we're going to keep our cadence of updating Plasma continuously. So Plasma 5.22, which is supposed to release in June. It'll obviously land in Rawhide first and then it'll come, but it'll be brought back into Fedora 34 as well. And we're going to introduce NeoChat preloaded for Fedora 35 and forward replacing conversation. But this is pending the transit, the introduction of the Fedora matrix server. So once that exists, we're planning on switching things over and working with the KDE community to make sure NeoChat's experience is rock solid for our users in time for Fedora Linux 35. And we're doing much more general user experience improvement collaboration with KDE. There's a bunch of other things that we're working on. We've got some tickets in our project issue tracker about user experience things to examine. So like there's quite a lot that we're looking at doing to improve the user experience around this, like things like how the default behaviors for opening and selecting objects on the desktop, things like improving scaling factors and iconography and theming stuff, further improvements for Wayland things, stuff like that. This is someone's asking in the chat, what is NeoChat? NeoChat is not IRC. It is for matrix. It is a matrix client. Conversation is the IRC client. And we are planning on replacing conversation in our default list, in our default applications with NeoChat as soon as the Fedora matrix server becomes available. Because Fedora is re-homing all of its real-time chat from being primarily IRC to be primarily matrix with IRC bridged into matrix. So we want to be on that train and make sure we provide a quality experience with matrix. So like if you wanna come and join us and help us with some stuff and bring your ideas and things like that, we have a project issue tracker. We've got our mailing list, there's the matrix room and the IRC channel. So feel free to come by and talk to us about it. So questions, switching from silver blue to kinoite. Okay, so Michelle Coneci, I'm sorry if I'm messing up your name, ask, is it possible to rebase from standard silver blue to kinoite or kinoite? I should also just keep mixing between the two pronunciations because it's more fun that way. Yes, it will be possible to do that because we are going to offer the kinoite remote on the Fedora OS tree remote and you can switch from the silver blue track to the kinoite track and back. So you'll be able to do those kinds of swaps freely. Yeah, Michelle, Salim mentions a Q&A tab is nice. Like I didn't know that that was there either that's pretty neat. Let's see, Mike Rashford asks, what are some areas of the Wayland support that may have some rough edges with KDE that people might wanna be aware of? Yeah, so there are in fact some unfortunate issues. One of the major ones is that the Nvidia support while is present in there is Wayland support for Nvidia in KDE Plasma, it is not complete because it requires the upcoming Nvidia 470 driver series from proprietary driver. If you're using the open source driver, like if your Nvidia hardware is so old that the Nouveau driver works for you, then you have a perfect experience now. But if you're using something that requires a proprietary driver to function at full performance, then the 465 series, which is what's currently out now has some minor stuff that makes it a little bit better. But there is the upcoming 470 series which adds hardware acceleration to X-Wailand. And there's some work going on with Mesa upstream and Nvidia to make it so that it switches from EGL streams to the general buffer manager to generic buffer manager. I forget what the GVM actually stands for to basically the standard way of allocating buffers and stuff like that for Wayland sessions. The goal here is to kind of make the Wayland support basically functionally equivalent. There's a few other things that aren't working like their primary selection between GTK 3 applications and Plasma is a little bit weird because the Wayland protocol that's actually being used first in GTK is some GTK specific one rather than the standard protocol. I believe that is the standard protocol support has been backboarded from GTK 4 to 3 and I'm not sure exactly if that landed in GA or if it's gonna be a GTK 3 update in Fedora but that is a thing. Another gotcha I think is there are just a couple of features that just straight up don't work in the Wayland session because there is no Wayland protocol to back them. They're very rarely used features mostly like Plasma's activities thing, full session restore on login. Those features require Wayland protocols to be defined to replace XT MCP I think is what the protocol's called. So that will come like in 522 or whatnot. So there's some edge cases and things like that but broadly speaking the Wayland session actually works quite well. I have three different computers, two Intel, one NVIDIA that it works quite well on. So it's been fine for me. Robbie Calicoche, sorry if I didn't quite get that right asks, is KD wallet included in Fedora Linux 34? So one of my favorite apps. I believe so, I'm pretty sure KWallet is still included. I know this because when I install and log in it prompts me to unlock my key ring. So I'm pretty sure that's still there but yeah, let's see what else. Oh yes, so on route mentions that we have offline updates. Yeah, so yeah, I forgot that that was a thing that we had actually changed but we changed that so early on in the development cycle that it had slipped my mind. Yeah, so with Plasma 521, we have switched over to using Plasma Discover as our update, updater tool in Fedora Linux 34 and we've also turned on offline updates. And the main reason we did this was because people were actually accidentally breaking their computers by doing their updates live and like doing things like doing DNF upgrade in the terminal and then do DNF upgrades in terminal and then start messing around with applications while it's upgrading and then constantly breaking their system. So offline updates make it so that those happen basically offline in the same way that it does in Fedora Workstation. You can of course still do DNF upgrade and that'll still do the same thing but like you're doing it through the GUI, it will use, it'll go through package kit offline updates and do that. Ben Cotton asks, what sort of help can the KDE SIG looking for and how can people pitch in? So really, I think the big thing that we kind of need help on right now is getting flat packs of KDE applications built in Fedora because Kenoite's gonna be very not useful if we don't have applications that people will want to use and there's a large library of Fedora applications of applications in Fedora that we should have available as flat packs. And in order to make those available, we need them built. And so I think there's like one person currently right now actively working on trying to untangle that and get flat packs built, but there's a lot more to do and it would be really great if people could pitch in and help with getting flat packs built from our RPMs. Generally, it would be appreciated if folks come and test these things and report bugs that you see with the Wayland Session to KDE upstream because they really wanna know, we are the first distribution to switch to Plasma Wayland and the goal here is to make it so that by the time we get through the next couple of years there's no need for the X Session. Like everything will work basically perfectly through Wayland and we can only get there by people using it, testing it, giving feedback and pushing things forward. What I wanna do for Plasma that the Workstation Working Group did for GNOME. And this is the great best way to kind of make that happen. So yeah, anything else from anyone else? Let's see here. I'll just scroll back a little bit on here. Looks like we don't have... Oh, Ben asks me, when do I sleep? I do sleep. You know that I sleep, Ben, it was kind of hard to not have to sleep because sleeping is how you keep your brain sharp. Lesson to everyone. You think all nighters are great? They're not. They're really not great. Christopher Pastore asks, did I hear that 34 with Wayland? Will I have no issues with my Nvidia card? No. No, no, no, I did not say that. There will still be some issues with Nvidia cards with Wayland and that is because the driver release that actually has most of the Wayland fix ups is not available yet. There's a lot of background work going on to bring up the infrastructure to support the Nvidia proprietary driver. Though this is something that I'm kind of intentionally sort of out of the loop on. That's partly because I don't have any hardware that uses Nvidia with the proprietary card and also partly because supporting the Nvidia proprietary driver is functionally impossible. But if kernel modes, but by default, if you're installing the Nvidia driver, you're probably not gonna see the Wayland session because kernel mode setting is not enabled by default with the Nvidia driver, so you will fall back to X. So that will probably get fixed in the near future, but like right now, unless you manually force the Nvidia proprietary driver to use kernel mode setting, you will probably not see Wayland normally because we had to turn off plasma for basic graphics mode. We had to turn off plasma Wayland for basic graphics mode to have it fall back to X for Fedora Linux 34. We're hoping to have that fixed in the near future and not have this limitation in Fedora Linux 35. So someone is asking is KDE Plasma Wayland session, does the KDE Plasma session work with Nvidia Optimus? I assume hybrid graphics here. It works as well as any other desktop that hasn't done any actual explicit work on hybrid graphics. Like there isn't exactly a knob to make it easy for you to move an application from one thing to another. So it moving between GPUs is a little difficult and that's probably not gonna change for a while because it's pretty difficult to implement. Although because we have Wayland now that becomes possible because a lot of the reasons why we couldn't is limitations in the X server. So we'll see. I'm optimistic. Daniel Axelrod asks, the last time I tried KDE was 15 years ago. I'm gonna try it again today. Yay! What are your favorite things about the KDE experience on Fedora that I should make sure to try? Well, that I would say my favorite bits about the KDE Plasma desktop are, hmm, that's a tough question. I kind of just like the holistic experience but the biggest thing I like about KDE Plasma is, and this is gonna be kind of, this kind of a little off-culture here, but I kind of just like the look and feel. I like the way that the applications look and how they feel, they feel conventional. They feel like I understand what's happening and it's just the application environment the applications just feel good to use. I don't have anything specific, although I will say one thing that I've noticed that's quite nice is that the pipe wire screen sharing stuff in with Plasma Wayland seems to work better than on GNOME on average, like the weird bugs that I often see on GNOME where when you do a screen sharing it's a huge black screen with just a mouse cursor. I don't see that on Plasma Wayland ever. It pretty much works the way it's supposed to. I've done screen sharing with Jitsi, with BlueJeans, with Google Meet and with Zoom all through the web browser and it works great. The Zoom client unfortunately does not work because Zoom has not yet implemented support for using the desktop portal correctly. They are using a GNOME shell specific API for the Wayland screen sharing stuff. I did file a ticket with them. I don't know if they're gonna actually fix it anytime soon but yeah, I don't know. But like I think you're just, Daniel I think the answer to your question is that it'll just kind of feel like you, like everything just kind of fits together. It's just the holistic experience is just nicer and it feels more intuitive to me. Although, actually now that I think of it, turn on Quinn effects, set up wobbly windows and configure the application task switching grid to being horizontal layout instead of the automatic one and it's great if you're using a touchpad because the touch gestures and the stuff like that just makes it feel very smooth and coherent. Edward Lucina asks that he says that he was told you can switch Quinn to any other window manager and it works. It was tested with i3 and it was working. Does this kind of configuration make sense or it's better to keep Quinn? Quinn's got, there are Quinn extensions to do tiling if you wanna do that. If you're working in the Wayland session you probably would, if you wanna switch the window manager to something else you technically can. I really don't advise that you do that especially with Wayland because a lot of it is based on integration around these different components. Though I have heard some reports of people using Sway and it works fine because Sway and Quinn basically have the same feature set in terms of Wayland protocol support. I guess if you're using the X11 session switching to i3 will also work but the application, it basically means you don't have decorators and things like that. So like, yeah, it'll work but I don't know why you would want to. I would say it's probably better to keep Quinn. Oh, so I got some comments here about wobbly windows. You know what, if enough people ask nicely I might make a thing where we have the wobbly windows by make a thing where we've got the wobbly windows on. And I love the cube. On one of my laptops I have the cube turned on. It is great. I love the cube. Anyway, I don't really have anything else. So if there's nothing else from, oh, there is another question here. Does Fedor have or are looking to add support for the alternative Quinn force? No, no, absolutely not. It is extremely difficult to already do what we're doing now and like the close relationship we have with the KDE project means it's a lot easier for us to work with the stuff that the KDE project is working with. So we're not gonna use any Quinn forks. But yeah, so that's it. I don't have anything else. Thank you all for coming. I appreciate that you came and listened to me talk about KDE. We'll check it out please and give it a spin and tell us how you think about it. So, bye all.