A PHP Dev Just Solved a 20+ Year-Old KDE Plasma Problem No One Else Would

Back in 2005, a bug report was filed by Kjetil Kjernsmo, then running KDE 3.3.2 on Debian Stable. He wanted the ability to have each connected screen show a different virtual desktop independently, rather than having all displays switch as one unit.

Over the years, over 15 duplicate reports piled onto the original as more people ran into the same wall. And that’s not a surprise, because multi-monitor setups have become increasingly common.

The technical reason why this issue stayed open this long comes down to X11. Implementing it there would have required violating the EWMH specification, which has no concept of multiple virtual desktops being active at the same time.

The KWin maintainer Martin Flöser had said as much in 2013, effectively ruling it out for the entire KDE 4.x series. The only realistic path was through Wayland, and that path needed someone willing to actually walk it.

Someone finally did. The feature has now landed in KWin’s master branch and is set for a Plasma 6.7 introduction.

How was this accomplished?

The merge request was opened by Hynek Schlindenbuch, a developer with no prior KDE contributions.

Each screen now independently tracks which virtual desktop it is showing. Any desktop can appear on any screen, and the same one can be shown on multiple screens at once. Windows belong to a specific screen, even if they visually span two, and can be assigned to one or more virtual desktops.

A window stays visible when its screen is showing one of those desktops. Keyboard shortcuts only switch the desktop on the currently active screen, not across all of them at once.

Unlike Hyprland, switching to a desktop does not pull focus to that desktop’s screen. Hynek made that choice deliberately.

VirtualDesktopManager tracks the current desktop separately for each output, and switching all screens together remains the default, with per-output switching available as an opt-in via settings.

Keep in mind that this fix is Wayland only. X11 was left out intentionally since it relies on the EWMH protocol, and with X11 support being dropped in Plasma 6.8 anyway, that is a less significant shortcoming than it sounds.

If you were curious about Hynek, he is a full-time PHP programmer with over six years of experience. His C++ background going into this project was minimal, and he had no experience with Qt or CMake and had only set up KDE Plasma on an old laptop a few months before opening the merge request.

The motivation for this was his plan to move to Wayland for fractional scaling support, but the missing per-screen desktop functionality was blocking his switch to Plasma.

See how a lone open source developer’s initiative changes things for the rest of us? 🙃

This article first appeared on Read More