Canonical Developers Now Preparing Mir 1.0 For Release With Wayland Support

[hoohoo]

Wayland is a protocol. Actual servers / compositors use Wayland. KWin / Mutter are KDE / Gnome examples. Mir is another example (not sure what it's going to be used for). It's different from X, where X itself meant the protocol and the server.

Want to make sure I understand you: KDE's KWin "window manager" is built on Wayland and not X?

[profoundWHALE]

Want to make sure I understand you: KDE's KWin "window manager" is built on Wayland and not X?

Kwin was/is being ported to Wayland. I don't really understand how it could be built on Wayland if it existed before Wayland was doing things.

[starshipeleven]

Want to make sure I understand you: KDE's KWin "window manager" is built on Wayland and not X?

Wayland is a protocol, like X11. Its server component is much slimmer than Xorg (which is the server of X11 protocol).

So what once were desktop compositors offloading to Xorg, become Wayland "servers" by integrating the server component into themselves.

[hoohoo]

Wayland is a protocol, like X11. Its server component is much slimmer than Xorg (which is the server of X11 protocol).

So what once were desktop compositors offloading to Xorg, become Wayland "servers" by integrating the server component into themselves.

Let me rephrase the question then: is KDE KWin a native implementation of Wayland protocol (ie compositor + server) and not a shim or wrapper that provides a Wayland protocol compliant interface atop an X server (which is, I do understand, an implementation of the X protocol)?

Thanks!

[TheBlackCat]

Let me rephrase the question then: is KDE KWin a native implementation of Wayland protocol (ie compositor + server) and not a shim or wrapper that provides a Wayland protocol compliant interface atop an X server (which is, I do understand, an implementation of the X protocol)?

The first one. Kwin is divided into three parts: a native X11-specific part, a native Wayland-specific part, and a shared part that works with either. The X11-specific part does not require Wayland and the Wayland-specific part does not require X11. You can run a Wayland session inside the X11 kwin version, and you can run an X11 session inside the Wayland kwin version, but the Wayland version can run without any X11 at all, and the X11 version can run without Wayland at all. The shared part doesn't care, it can run with the Wayland or X11 version.

[hoohoo]

The first one. Kwin is divided into three parts: a native X11-specific part, a native Wayland-specific part, and a shared part that works with either. The X11-specific part does not require Wayland and the Wayland-specific part does not require X11. You can run a Wayland session inside the X11 kwin version, and you can run an X11 session inside the Wayland kwin version, but the Wayland version can run without any X11 at all, and the X11 version can run without Wayland at all. The shared part doesn't care, it can run with the Wayland or X11 version.

Fanstastic! I will try it out. Thanks for explaining!