KDE Developers Continue Working Toward Wayland Support

[Nobu]

5minedit, and sorry, skimmed over "compositor". Ignore me.

[Nobu]

kwin doesn't fully support wayland yet, but work has definitly been rolling on that.

What I understood from reading that (iirc; I read it last night), is the big work to come is getting kwin/wayland to work with plasma, and a few other desktop-centric things (getting process info to the task-list in the panel, etc.).

[Plombo]

I'm not sure i agree that's the biggest task involved, but you are right that they haven't really started it yet.

A year ago i predicted a test version would come out this fall, with something production-ready by spring 2015. That prediction is still looking pretty good to me - and yes, one of the KDE devs back then told me it was terrible. We'll see.

I suppose that what is the "biggest task" depends on individual interpretation of what constitues a single "task". I can't see that prediction happening, though - there is a massive amount of protocol that has to be implemented. And the decision to use server-side decorations will likely complicate things further, as no existing Wayland compositor does AFAIK.

[smitty3268]

So the gist is that work still hasn't started on making KWin a Wayland compositor, which is by far the biggest task involved.

I'm not sure i agree that's the biggest task involved, but you are right that they haven't really started it yet.

A year ago i predicted a test version would come out this fall, with something production-ready by spring 2015. That prediction is still looking pretty good to me - and yes, one of the KDE devs back then told me it was terrible. We'll see.

[bakgwailo]

Yeah, I read last year some Qt/KDE devs bragging about making KDE work on Wayland by like Q1 2014 and for like half a year test it well and ship by Q3 2014 a solid KDE/wayland solution.

And this kind of unrealistic timelines happen a lot in real life, you plan one timeline, in reality it turns out you need a lot more time. Another example, read Mark Shuttleworth's blog from 2010 where he vouches for Wayland and saying like: we plan for full Wayland support/transition by 2012 but I'm afraid it will take till 2014 to make it really happen - we're in 2014 and even that pessimistic plan (2014) was way too optimistic.

Well, they did have initial support in 4.x, although it was rather hacky. QT5 itself supports Wayland already, AFIAK. I also know that in the beginning KDE wanted initial support in 5.0, however, they were pretty quick to say they were moving that to 5.1, and were only laying the groundwork for it in 5.0. From what I can tell, the really big piece, which was done in 5.0, was refactoring everything and removing all the xlib stuff.

[mark45]

So the gist is that work still hasn't started on making KWin a Wayland compositor, which is by far the biggest task involved.

Yeah, I read last year some Qt/KDE devs bragging about making KDE work on Wayland by like Q1 2014 and for like half a year test it well and ship by Q3 2014 a solid KDE/wayland solution.

And this kind of unrealistic timelines happen a lot in real life, you plan one timeline, in reality it turns out you need a lot more time. Another example, read Mark Shuttleworth's blog from 2010 where he vouches for Wayland and saying like: we plan for full Wayland support/transition by 2012 but I'm afraid it will take till 2014 to make it really happen - we're in 2014 and even that pessimistic plan (2014) was way too optimistic.

[Plombo]

So the gist is that work still hasn't started on making KWin a Wayland compositor, which is by far the biggest task involved.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Developers Continue Working Toward Wayland Support

KDE's Sebastian K?gler has provided an update regarding KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 support for Wayland as an alternative to running on an X11/X.Org Server...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc0OTI