Chrome quirks under KDE Plasma with Wayland on Debian Trixie

Most of my Linux work these days involves working at the terminal, SSHing into our fleet of Linux servers at work. I split my time between using my MacBook and my university-issued HP EliteBook running Windows 11. I recently moved house and had a bit of a home workspace revamp, and decided to pick up a slim desktop PC (a Dell Slim ECS1250) to use with Linux as a daily driver^[1].

It's been years since I used KDE day to day (our Linux desktops at the office primarily use Gnome w/ GDM3), but I wanted to give KDE (Plasma) a go again. I'm not particularly fond of the desktop paradigm in recent versions of Gnome (~49) - having to install an extension just to get a dock/taskbar felt like I was fighting against the system. And Plasma felt so lightweight and balanced in comparison.

For the most part, it's working well but I did encounter some quirks in Chrome that I struggled to find documented online. I'm writing this post because I'm sure I'm not the only person who has scratched their head over these issues.

Keyboard input in text fields not working after Ctrl-Tabbing through browser tabs

I noticed quickly that after cycling through Chrome tabs using Ctrl-Tab, I could no longer type into text fields without either refreshing the page or Alt-Tabbing away from Chrome and back again.

This turned out to be an iBus integration issue with KDE Plasma. iBus was installed by default (perhaps because I also installed Gnome when installing the OS). I decided that as I wouldn't be using Gnome, I would uninstall Gnome, GDM (I was using SDDM) and iBus. After rebooting, this resolved the issue.

Flickering shadows

The most noticeable and irritating minor issue was the shadow around the main Chrome window flickering as I typed in the omnibox (address bar). This seems to be caused by the KWin window manager and compositor fighting Chrome's own shadow drawing mechanism, which uses client side decoration (CSD). The fix was straightforward once I figured out the cause.

I could either:

1. Disable shadows in the Plasma theme globally, and let Chrome draw its own shadows unimpeded (by going to System Settings -> Colours & Themes -> Window Decorations -> click the edit icon for the theme (Breeze, in my case) -> Shadows and Outline tab and setting Shadow size to None). But this would make Chrome behave differently to every other application, being the only one with shadows.
2. Tell Chrome to use the native system window decorations and stop drawing its own (by going, in Chrome, to Settings -> Appearance and checking Use system title bar and borders). This works well, but does give Chrome a little more window chrome by adding a title bar and moving the maximise, minimise and close buttons onto the title bar.

Option 2 seemed like the better compromise.