Congrats to all the developers and users who have contributed to this major milestone. Thank you all for the hard work in making explicit sync a reality, and for the continued work on building out forward-looking features that empower users and developers to do more with all of this amazing hardware. Special shout-out to zamundaaa and everyone at KDE for enabling users to harness this progress so quickly.
With that out of the way, here are a few things I noticed on release day:
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Explicit Sync delivers
6.0 with the 555 drivers fixed nearly all the visual artifacts with Xwayland, and 6.1 seems to only improve upon it. It appears that frame timing / latency is tighter and subjectively it feels great. If you’re coming from an older DE, or haven’t yet used Wayland via Plasma6.x/555+, you’re in for a treat. -
Better color in HDR mode
HDR mode in 6.1 is in much better shape now that Plasma uses the RGB primaries embedded in the monitor metadata (via EDID). This means that you can confidently enable HDR in the Display Configuration settings page of Plasma and it shouldn’t look egregiously off like it probably did in 6.0. Although this is a huge improvement for most users, those who want or need greater color accuracy are still going to have to wait for more options as the primaries are not manually editable and profiles aren’t yet ironed out. Hopefully this is just the beginning for HDR / Color Management. -
VRR still flickers with LFC
The partial black frame flicker in VRR mode still occurs when the frame rate gets low enough to engage LFC. The lower the framerate and brighter the image the more evident the effect. Flicker occasionally follows back to the desktop while VRR is on, and other times the desktop will be fine after exiting the application. It’s very distracting and needs a proper fix, but at least it doesn’t seem to occur with applications that stay well within the standard VRR range and can be mitigated by disabling VRR for those that don’t. -
Firefox 127.0 crashes
Firefox crashes somewhat randomly unless launched with “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 firefox”. This bug was reported to Mozilla about a month ago so hopefully a fix is in the works.