KDE On Wayland For KDE SC 4.8, 4.9?

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 23 November 2011 at 08:27 AM EST. 10 Comments
KDE
Yesterday in Darmstadt, Germany I met up with Martin Gräßlin, the developer known for leading KDE's KWin compositing window manager advancements, and a few other Linux developers. A few words about KDE on Wayland were said.

Back at the 2011 Berlin Desktop Summit plans were expressed by Martin Gräßlin to have the first phase of KDE's KWin on the Wayland Display Server by the KDE SC 4.8 release in January. Work to bring KDE up directly on top of Wayland would then be set for the summer 2012 release of KDE SC 4.9. There were also other KDE-Wayland related statements too (read: KDE draws up plans for Wayland in 2012). At the Darmstadt Ratskeller I followed up with Martin about the Wayland enablement.

While there is some code in place in separate KDE branches for KWin, for KDE SC 4.8 there won't be the first bits of Wayland support. Martin also doesn't know whether he will merge this code for KDE SC 4.9. Right now Martin's waiting on either an official release of Wayland or for a major Linux distribution to ship Wayland packages that are usable. Until then, the work is effectively idling out of the mainline tree.

Canonical has expressed interest in a Wayland preview for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but there's no signs yet of committing to any actual Wayland engineering support. The packages they have provided of Wayland in recent Ubuntu Linux releases have been outdated, largely useless, and just bundled with a couple basic Wayland demos when Wayland is running within an X.Org Server.

There is the Wayland Engineering Team at Intel, but with Tizen replacing MeeGo and that not being off to a great start, they likely won't be shipping a Wayland Display Server immediately.


At least by the time there is Wayland mainline support in KDE/KWin, hopefully Qt 5.0 will be out there with its proper Wayland support too.

Other recent (non-KDE) Wayland news to mention is the Wayland screensaver interface and the Enlightenment E17 upbringing under Wayland. Wayland will also be a topic at FOSDEM 2012 in February for those joining us in Brussels.
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