The KDE Blog announced this massive feature which is coming to the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.20.
Update: OCT 13, 2020: KDE Plasma 5.20 Officially Released. Read the complete coverage here.
Screen recording and screencasting should be working from now on under Wayland in KDE Plasma 5.20. As announced in the blog post, both of these features will work with compatible applications inside KDE. As per the task report in KDE Phabricator (ref#1, ref#2) which is a task manager for KDE, the work is completed related to this. The required programming changes are done based on Pipewire which manages the video feeds and output/window streams from the desktop.
For example, OBS Studio which is a live streaming and screen recording software should now work well under Wayland in KDE Plasma 5.20.
If you use Wayland, you might be already aware of screen recording and screencasting issues by respective applications. The applications do not work well under Wayland. Take an example of Shutter. Shutter is a great screenshot tool but if you use it under Wayland – it crashes and becomes non-responsive. This fix is really big deal if you see below screenshot.
This has been taken in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Wayland when using Shutter to capture a screenshot. This locks your entire screen.
Hopefully, Shutter will also work in KDE Plasma 5.20 when it is released.
KDE Plasma 5.20 is becoming a massive release as the improvements pouring in every week. Some of the major highlights which we covered here of KDE Plasma 5.20.
Not only that, specifically a huge Wayland related improvements are being added. Here’s a quick list of Wayland related important changes that are coming in KDE Plasma 5.20:
Wayland related improvements in KDE Plasma 5.20
- Middle-click paste now works on Wayland.
- KRunner’s window now appears in the right place when using a top panel on Wayland.
- Klipper now uses the Wayland clipboard and works as you would expect in a Wayland session.
- The last-used keyboard layout is now remembered on Wayland
- When using a pen for input on Wayland, the position of the drawn lines is no longer vertically offset by the height of the title bar
- On Wayland, it’s now possible to enter full-screen mode in MPV by double-clicking on the video
- Previews for cursor themes now correctly display real-time previews as you hover your cursor over them on Wayland
However, you can not try this feature at the moment as I could not find any daily KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment build available as a containerized image. So, we have to wait until the final release due in October 2020 this year.
Via KDE blog.
