KDE Marks Four Years In Its Process Of Porting To Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Marks Four Years In Its Process Of Porting To Wayland

KDE KWin maintainer Martin Gr??lin made a blog post today commemorating the four years that he's been focusing on getting Wayland support up and running natively with the KWin window manager / compositor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Wayland-Four-Years

[mark45]

Just 4 more years for KDE to support Wayland well. About the same time it takes to build an aircraft-carrier.

[Azrael5]

The preminent fact is to begin also if 4 years are so long.

[fguerraz]

So much for "KDE is more modular and better written than Gnome", one would have thought it would have been easier to port to Wayland if that was the case...

[Kemosabe]

Just 4 more years for KDE to support Wayland well. About the same time it takes to build an aircraft-carrier.

Yeah, building the carrier for 4 years can be compared to compiling kde for an hour. The actual construction phase of the carrier took probably about 20 years. 5-10 years of combat tests still missing.

[TheBlackCat]

So much for "KDE is more modular and better written than Gnome", one would have thought it would have been easier to port to Wayland if that was the case...

We'll never know which is easier. The kwin wayland porting process happened at the same time as the Qt5 porting process, the plasma workspaces 2 porting process, and the frameworks split and porting process. The Gnome wayland porting process happened when there was little else going on in terms of the window manager. So they aren't really comparable.

[lunarcloud]

Not to mention that KWin has supported far more varying levels of hardware than any other window manager I've ever seen. They let you go from XRender on base VESA drivers all the way to choosing the version of OpenGL your card supports. That kind of scalability is both wonderfully impressive and requires time to port over right.
The KDE guys always blog about what they're doing, what they've tried, and why they're doing it the way they are. They are extremely professional and don't do things the wrong way because they've already started and it'll be faster. I'm cool with them taking the time to do it right.
Besides, I don't see a lot of Wayland compatible games on Steam, so I'm not in a rush.

[Michael_S]

We'll never know which is easier. The kwin wayland porting process happened at the same time as the Qt5 porting process, the plasma workspaces 2 porting process, and the frameworks split and porting process. The Gnome wayland porting process happened when there was little else going on in terms of the window manager. So they aren't really comparable.

It's much simpler than that, even - unless someone else has statistics, I don't think we can confidently assert how much resources the KDE team put on Wayland versus the GNOME/Gtk team. Or maybe the GNOME person tasked with the port was a Wayland spec contributor and the KDE person was not, or vice versa.

I think fguerraz's assertion is impossible to prove.

[smitty3268]

It's much simpler than that, even - unless someone else has statistics, I don't think we can confidently assert how much resources the KDE team put on Wayland versus the GNOME/Gtk team. Or maybe the GNOME person tasked with the port was a Wayland spec contributor and the KDE person was not, or vice versa.

I think fguerraz's assertion is impossible to prove.

I think it's pretty safe to assume Red Hat pumped a lot of resources into porting Gnome 3, and the KDE team is definitely small.

So it's an apples to oranges comparison right from the start.

[Awesomeness]

So much for "KDE is more modular and better written than Gnome", one would have thought it would have been easier to port to Wayland if that was the case...

Who claimed that KWin (what you erroneously call KDE) was easier to port to Wayland? If anything, KWin does much more than Mutter and is harder to port (especially without Red Hat's "unlimited" resources).