KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.

New to Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 are the following few changes:

- external-brightness: Allow the client to specify observed brightness

- output management: add a failure reason event

- output device,-management: add a dimming multiplier

- output device/management: add power/performance vs. color accuracy preference

Allowing the client to specify the observed brightness can be useful with the kde_external_brightness_v1 v2 protocol while arguably the most interesting is the output device/management addition of adding a power/performance versus color accuracy preference. This ties into the work by Linux graphics driver developers for [1]power saving policies whether to focus on power/performance over optimal color accuracy or alternatively artists and others demanding the utmost color accuracy can engage the preference at the cost of possible power-savings/performance.

"The compositor can do a lot of things that trade between performance, power and color accuracy. This setting describes a high level preference from the user about in which direction that tradeoff should be made."

This preference is added to the kde_output_device_v2 protocol with the "color_power_tradeoff" allowing values of either efficiency or accuracy.

More details on the Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 release via [2]KDE.org.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Power-Saving-Policy

[2] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/01/09/plasma-wayland-protocols-1.16.0/