When launching an already open single window/instance application (e.g. krusader or systemsettings) via shortcut, krunner, or kickoff, the window is not raised to the top under wayland. Under X11, the window is raised to the top, making it a very convenient way to switch to a special application without relying on alt+tab or the taskbar. This is also quite unexpected, if for example another systemsettings window is opened, but forgotten by the user. In this case it seems like launching systemsettings is not working at all. Instead, the systemsettings just update the displayed kcm. Focus stealing prevention is turned off. Operating System: Gentoo Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.87.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.14.10-gentoo (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa DRI Intel® HD Graphics 4600
The above system settings example also applied to several places where the system settings are called from within plasma applets. E.g., when clicking "Configure Event Notifications and Actions" in the notification applet.
It's a known issue that requires every toolkit and app to opt into the new Wayland activation protocol that Aleix wrote recently. Support is already in GTK 4.2, and here is the patch for Qt: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwayland/+/321246 Once that's done, 3rd-party apps will also need to opt in. This is very annoying, I know. :(
THX 4 info! Sadly, the patch does not apply to latest qt5 qtwayland package ^^ will this be backported to qt 5 or will we have to wait for qt 6 adoption until this will is working?
one more related question: is there a dbus interface to raise applications or something similar, to work around this issue in the meanwhile?
I don't have answers to those questions, sorry.
If somebody else is looking for workarounds. Someone implemented a script raise an application via kwins scripting interface. https://github.com/academo/ww-run-raise