This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland! What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing laten…

This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland!

What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not having support for it on Wayland was the most common source of random graphical glitches and slowdowns.

This work was done by Xaver Hugl, and lands in Plasma 6.1. You can read more about it in a recent blog post he wrote on the topic!

In addition to that impactful but technical change, this was a week of many UI improvements and bug fixes as well:

  • Unmarketable PlushieEnglish
    8•1 month ago

    To my knowledge, we’ll have to wait for proprietary drivers to support this, which will take a few months iirc