I moved to KDE for better gaming support, but I really dislike the condensed look of everything in the settings app, discover, and most of all in Dolphin.
Are there any discrete, simple, clean themes that have more padding ? I like how GNOME looks but I really dislike their slow development for gaming related stuff.
DEs ship their own Wayland compositors. Kwin for KDE and Mutter for GNOME. Both have different capabilities. Kwin has support for VRR & HDR, and better color management. KDE Plasma has GUIs to visually configure them. GNOME has almost no support for this, either on the compositor and/or the GUI.
X11 had it’s own compositor, the X.Org server. Things changed.
As I understand it, functionality like VRR is provided by the DRM driver in the kernel, not the compositor. Hence my question.
I can’t tell you the exact way the API works myself, but I do know that Gnome is still working on enabling VRR support. On the vase level the functionality is implemented in the driver, of course, but support needs to be available across the stack. It’s not like games talk to the kernel and GPU driver directly to get graphical output, there’s a desktop environment they need to take into account.
LOL that’s exactly what they do.
They do not need to take the desktop environment into account. They ask for a window and they render into it. They’ll ask for a window using either the OpenGL or Vulcan API. Both those APIs abstract the windowing system away, the desktop is entirely irrelevant. Under Wayland, the compositor requests a buffer from the kernel, provides it to the game and then manages where on the desktop that buffer is rendered. The game’s rendering is done directly (talking to the kernel and GPU driver) without going anywhere near either the compositor or the desktop environment.
The desktop environment means nothing when it comes to gaming. Except in so far as it may provide a GUI to configure aspects of the system that would otherwise be configured on the comand line or, for example by interacting with /sys.
This is why I asked what OP meant when they said KDE “supports” gaming better. Seems ridiculous. The desktop environment is not involved in game rendering. It has no impact. I’m mystified as to why people think it does.
The render surface handed out by the compositor, games don’t take control of the GPU. You can’t have a game enable VRR on the GPU while other processes lock the FPS to 60, and in most compositors there are multiple applications to keep track of.
I suppose interfacing through DXVK which interfaces through the Vulkan platform which interfaces through the Vulkan drivers which interfaces to the GPU drivers does involve talking to the GPU, but games certainly aren’t in control of the hardware the same way Kwin or Mutter is.
Because VRR doesn’t work on Gnome/Mutter. Well, it should, after the MR that was merged this week, but that’s very recent code.
That’s what I said. You’re repeating what I said back to me.
you’re explanation makes sense and yet, gaming still works better on kde. it’s a known reality.
What do you mean?
There is no HDR protocol for Wayland, so Wayland compositors cannot display HDR content. X11 also does not have HDR support, so window managers can’t do it either. Games don’t draw their own windows. If the compositor doesn’t support HDR, the game isn’t gonna be displayed in HDR. If the compositor doesn’t support VRR, then VRR is also not going to work. Plasma 6 implements a custom Wayland HDR protocol which is also implemented by the Steam Deck. This allows it to display HDR content. It has also had VRR support for a few years. GNOME is waiting for the official HDR protocol for Wayland to be complete before implementing support, so it doesn’t have it. It also didn’t have VRR until relatively recently.
If you don’t believe this, then can you explain why Plasma devs have been advertising HDR support as one of Plasma 6’s killer features? Can you explain the purpose of this recently merged VRR merge request for Mutter? What is the purpose of this merge request for a color management/HDR Wayland protocol which has been in the works for years? If compositors have no involvement in HDR or VRR, then why are their developers working their asses off to make it work? And most importantly, can you show me HDR on Linux working in GNOME? Or Cinnamon? Or anything that’s not Plasma or Gamescope?