KWin On Wayland Without X11 Support Can Startup So Fast It Causes Problems

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems.

Without XWayland for providing legacy X11 support to KDE Wayland clients, the KWin compositor fires up so fast that it can cause a crash in their Wayland integration as KWin's internal connection isn't even established... Yep, Wayland compositors are much leaner and cleaner than the aging X Server code-base that dates back 30+ years, granted most of the XWayland code is much newer than that.

Martin Flöser explained the issue in this recent commit to workaround the problem.

This fix will be found in the upcoming Plasma 5.12 release.

Right now though most Linux desktop users still need XWayland support, but hopefully by the end of 2018 we'll see most day-to-day use-cases supporting native Wayland quite well.