Plasma 5.20 is now in beta, which gives us one month of intense testing, bugfixing and polishing.

During this time we need as many hands on deck as possible to help with finding regressions, triaging incoming reports and generally being on top of as much as possible.

In order to make this process more accessible, more systematic and hopefully more fun we are going to run an official "Plasma Beta Review Day"

Who?

Any user of plasma able to install the latest beta or run a live ISO with our beta on it who want to help.

When?

Thursday the 24th September; midday to midnight CEST, with people welcome to turn up and drop out whenever.

Where?

Join us in the webconferencing channel: https://meet.kde.org/b/dav-gmr-qzx The webserver we used for Akademy. There will be a room available.
You can join with a camera and a microphone or just in the classic text chat.

What will this consistent of?

• Introductions to bugzilla for people who want support filing or triaging their first bugs
• Being assigned short buglists to validate, de-duplicate, for those more experienced
• Going through a defined list of all the new areas of Plasma to check for regressions
• Devs being online so we can get debug info for issues you have so we can identify and fix things in real time

What should I prepare?

Ideally get yourself set up with a beta of the latest Plasma. Follow the links for:
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Live_Images for an image running either master or Plasma 5.19.90

I hope to see you all soon!

About QtQuick and RHI

QtQuick, in one word, is amazing.

QtQuick, in slightly more words, is a scene graph implementation. At a developer level we create abstract "Items" which might be some text or a rectangle etc or a picture. This in turn gets transformed into a tree of nodes with geometry, "materials" and transforms. In turn this gets translated into a big long stream of OpenGL instructions which we send to the graphic card.

Qt6 will see this officially change to sit on top of the "Render Hardware Interface" stack, that instead of always producing OpenGL, will support Vulkan, Metal and Direct3D natively. The super clever part about it is that custom shaders (low level fast drawing) are also abstracted; meaning we will write some GLSL and generate the relevant shader for each API without having to duplicate the work.

This blog series gives a lot more detail: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-quick-on-vulkan-metal-direct3d.

Plasma code primarily interacts with Items and occasionally nodes, slightly above the level being abstracted.

Current State

Qt 5.15 ships with a tech preview of RHI and the Vulkan interface. I spent some time to set it up and explore what we need to do to get our side fully working. With some packages installed, a few plasma code fixes and some env vars set, I have a fully working Vulkan plasmashell.

Screenshot

Unsurprisingly it looks the same, so a screenshot is very unexciting. I enabled the Mesa overlay as some sort of proof.
The reason it shows 2fps is because plasmashell only updates when something has changed; in this case the textcursor blinking every 500ms.

Despite it being a preview it is in a damn good state! Things are usable, and really quite snappy, especially notification popups.

What needs work

Some things need work on our side, in particular:

• All of our custom shaders need porting to the updated shader language.
• Taskbar thumbnails use low level GL code that needs one extra layer of implementation.
• Use of QtQuickWidget in systemsettings.

It means some elements are invisible or don't render with the full graphical effects, or in the last case, crash.

But in the whole scheme of things, everything is in a very encouraging state

What about KWin?

Whilst QtQuick is the cornerstone of plasmashell, systemsettings and so many applications, for historical reasons KWin made use of OpenGL before it was a mainstream part of Qt. Therefore this setup is mostly unrelated to KWin. Fortunately there's no reason these two have to be in sync.

Wrap up

This isn't usable for end users, and given it's only a tech preview upstream, this is not something we can ever expect to officially support within Plasma 5.

But we can start doing the prep work, also the current state is so promising I think we can deliver a native Vulkan experience to users on the first day of Plasma 6.

Since Plasma 5.18, about 7 months ago, Plasma has shipped with a telemetry system. Opt in (i.e off by default) it requires users to go to choose if (and how much) data to send to us.
No private or identifying information is sent, and everything is stored inline with our privacy policy.

Currently we have hit just shy of 100,000 updates!

We have started off requesting very little information. Versions, GPU info and some basic screen information. However the library powering this is extremely powerful and capable of so much more that we can try and build on in the future to try and identify weak areas and areas we need to invest time and effort and also to identify features or platforms that maybe are under utilised and can be dropped.

I have recently been trying to improve on how we can extract and visaulise data from the data collected and draw some conclusions. I want to present some of the aggregated metrics.

What we can learn from Plasma statistics

Used Plasma Versions

To explain our numerical versioning additons.
.80 = git master before the next version, up until the beta
.90 = after the stable branch forks for release up until the next.0 release.

LTS

The biggest surprise is that LTS is currently only used by around 5% of people with 93% of reporting users on the lastest stable (5.19)

At the current rate it does make me question whether the LTS is worth it. Maybe LTS will only gain traction when the next LTS distro gets a release which could come later?

Obviously any decision will only be made as the result of a discussion with all stakeholders, but this is definitely raising questions.

Testing

Right now about 1.5% of people run master, I had expected those users to be the most into helping with the telemetry and skew this further.
The bigger surprise is the number of people running master seems to fluctuate. Weekly users can go between 30-60. I had expected this to be constant.

It is comforting to see that betas do get more users, going up to 2.5% of our reporting userbase.

Interesting observations

There is one person who is still activitly using Plasma 5.18 beta. Not 5.18, the beta for 5.18.. which was 8 months ago.
I have so many questions.

Screens

800x600 resolution setups are still a thing we need to support, even if they are just VMs they're still used. This is very relevant as we often get commits blindly setting a minimum size hint of a window to be bigger because it "looks nicer". I now know I do still need to ensure in review that we don't break these setups.

We also see that ultrawide monitors are surprisingly unpopular despite clearly being the best monitor setup possible.

Graphic drivers

The graph is pretty self-explanatory, Intel has the most, but the Nvidia proprietory driver comes in at ~1/4 of the total users.
It makes it an important target to support as best as we can even if it comes with its share of problems.

My personal setup doesn't match your conclusions!

The reason we want to use telemetrics is to drive decisions with real data.

As a user you are more than welcome to choose to opt into the statistics or not, we understand privacy is important which is why everything is opt-in only.
However, real decisions will ultimately be based on the data we have available, if you want your usecases to be noted, please do consider submitting to the telemetry to us.
To enable telemetry please go to "System Settings" and select the "User Feedback" tab.