Unsetting QT_QPA_PLATFORM environment variable by default

Since the introduction of the Plasma/Wayland session we set the QT_QPA_PLATFORM variable to wayland by default. After a long and hard discussion we decided to no longer do this with Plasma 5.13. This was a hard decision and unliked by everyone involved.

The environment variable forced Qt applications to use the wayland QPA platform plugin. This showed a problem which is difficult to address: if Qt does not have the wayland QPA platform plugin the application just doesn’t start. If you start through the console, the application will tell you:

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "wayland"
in "".

Available platform plugins are: minimal, xcb.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Aborted (core dumped)

That is not really a useful information and does not tell the user what to do. Neither does it tell the user where the actual problem is and how to solve it. As mentioned when using a graphical launcher it’s worse as the app just doesn’t start without any feedback.

But how can it happen that the qpa platform plugin is missing although Plasma itself happily uses it? The problem is that application installed outside of the system bundle their own Qt and Qt does not (yet) include QtWayland QPA platform plugin. This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session.

The best solution is for Qt including the QPA platform plugin and having a proper auto-detection based on XDG_SESSION_TYPE. The situation will improve with Qt 5.11, but it doesn’t really help as the Qt LTS versions will continue to face the problem.

For now we implemented a change in Plasma 5.13 so that we don’t need to set the env variable any more. Plasma is able to select the appropriate platform plugin based on XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable. Non-Plasma processes will use the default platform plugin. With Qt < 5.11 this is xcb, with Qt 5.11 this will most likely change to wayland. KDE’s flatpak applications pick Wayland by default in a Wayland session and are unaffected by the change.

What is really sad about the change is that the Wayland qpa platform plugin gets less testing now. So we would like to ask our users to continue testing application with the Wayland platform plugin by setting the env variable manually or specifying –platform wayland when starting an application.