A Research Project For KDE's KWin On Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Research Project For KDE's KWin On Wayland

Martin Gräßlin has been making some very interesting advancements to KWin in the past year or so, after having issues with open-source Mesa drivers, this German developer has made this compositing window manager for the KDE Plasma desktop run on OpenGL ES 2.0 and even optional support for OpenGL 3.x. He wouldn't mind some help though, so this summer for KDE's involvement in Google's Summer of Code he has proposed three fairly interesting projects, two of which benefit KWin on Wayland...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTI2Mg

[89c51]

is this even possible at the current state of wayland????

afaik there are many things that must be done in wayland before window managers can work

[TheBlackCat]

He said on the mailing list that he doesn't consider the Wayland project to be a good one at this point, and is discouraging people from applying for it. Since it is impossible to get an actual real, working Wayland client, he considers it a waste of time and thinks that the other projects (particularly the refactoring) should be done insteand.

[Nobu]

is this even possible at the current state of wayland????

Well, sure, you could. Since Wayland is just a protocol/reference implementation, you could take what's done and piece together what's missing yourself. But, much like browser vendors implementing features before they become "standard", when that part of the protocol is specified, if it's different from what you've done, you're either on your own or you've successfully fragmented a protocol. (of course, browsers have prefixes to help "prevent" this, but we have no such luxury)

Then the question becomes, "why would someone do this instead of contributing to the creation of the protocol?" Of course, we hope that they do contribute instead of just working on their own implementation; I think that's been the case so far, but I could be wrong.