The KDE Plasma desktop environment has long had an issue with the proprietary nVidia drivers. The KDE team had a policy of not working around other people’s bugs, and according to them, the issues in question were in the nVidia drivers themselves, not any KDE code.
The bug would manifest when the user would use standby (sleep) mode. Upon resuming, the nameplates for the desktop icons would be distorted… they could be missing completely, all white, or most commonly, an apparently random mix of colored pixels. The workaround was to restart the Plasma shell, which would fix the problem until the next sleep cycle. I found a reference that shows an easy way to create a service to auto-restart the Plasma shell on resume from sleep, which would fix the issue, but the continued existence of the bug (whomever’s fault it was!) was a thorn in the side of many a nVidia user on a KDE system.
When Plasma 5.16 was announced, KDE’s patch notes indicated that this bug had been fixed in this version… but only when Qt 5.13 was installed. The first release of 5.16 shipped with Qt 5.12.x, and as of the final release of Plasma 5.16, which is the now current 5.16.5, the Qt version shipped by KDE Neon (the Ubuntu-based Linux distro developed by KDE) was still 5.12.x.
While KDE usually gets new releases of Qt out pretty quick, in this case, there was a pretty long gap between the release of Qt 5.13 and its debut in Neon. KDE has said that some nasty bugs in Qt 5.13 made them decide to wait for 5.13.1… which is now available.
I use the “User” edition of Neon normally. KDE has three main versions of Neon… User, Developer stable, and Developer unstable, with User being the most stable and Developer unstable having the bleeding-edge stuff. I decided to have a look at what was offered in Developer stable by substituting its repository for the User one, and Qt 5.13.1 was finally there! I made a quick Timeshift snapshot of my G3’s setup, then proceeded to let it update the system to Developer stable status.
Well, it works. I disabled the service to restart the Plasma shell, then put the G3 into standby, then resumed it. The bug with nVidia is indeed gone, and it’s flawless now. The new 5.16.90 version of Plasma (the beta for what will be 5.17) is noticeably quicker starting up, and everything is working fine with it.
The next Plasma release is scheduled to come to Neon user edition in mid-October, and I would guess Qt 5.13.1 will come with it. For non-Neon distros that use KDE, Qt 5.13.1 and Plasma 5.16 or later are certainly in the pipeline, if they haven’t already arrived.
One thing that does not work now is QtCurve, the widget theme engine I’ve been using. I’ve seen messages several years old expressing surprise that anyone was still using the moribund QtCurve, and here it is a couple of years down the pike… but it still worked nicely for me, until now. I don’t know if QtCurve has any active developers or not, so time will tell if this gets fixed. A few years ago, Qtcurve was considered abandoned, like Classic Shell in the Windows world. Whether anyone has taken over since those years ago, I do not know.
I’m using the default Breeze widget theme/engine now. It’s not my favorite in terms of look… it’s too flat for my taste, but Breeze is available in GTK also, and starting with this release of Plasma, will automatically use the colors from the KDE color scheme, for a more seamless integration of GTK programs into the KDE world in terms of their appearance. Many programs in the Linux world are GTK programs, so it would be nice for them to look like they belong here. The new GTK implementation of Breeze will also apply the same window decorations to GTK CSD (client side decorated) applications, so they will look more native than ever before.
In the Windows 10 world, a similar situation exists with Windows “desktop applications” that use the traditional theming and common controls that Windows has long used, and the UWP bits like Settings. Even though UWP has been pronounced dead by the tech press, much of Windows 10 is still using its design language, resulting in an OS that is half and half, or a “zebra” OS, as Microsoft itself calls it internally.
In KDE, these two halves are being more closely integrated than ever before. For the most part, the zebra is gone. Some fine tuning remains to be done, but it’s looking very good so far.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
