Plasma Worskpaces 2 On Wayland, A Converged Shell

The future of the KDE desktop was planned earlier this month at a developer event held at the SUSE headquarters.

Already we wrote about the results of KDE, Unity, GNOME, and Razor-Qt developers meeting up at SUSE's Nürnberg offices. There were also clear statements about KDE support for Wayland. Now over on the KDE web-site is a nice summary of their Plasma planning.

The posting confirms that Wayland support will come to KDE beginning with Plasma Workspaces 2 in conjunction with KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5. X11 will continue to be supported but with this future version of KDE it should work very well atop the modern Wayland design.

The other big item was talking about a "generic shell" for use on all devices. There is only a single Plasma code-base for supporting all devices / form-factors. This has long been known as part of Plasma's device convergence strategy. With all of this new code going into KDE, the developers made it clear they are not wanting to disrupt the current user-experience or to introduce any regressions to primary workflows compared to KDE Plasma 4.

It was also noted again that Plasma Workspaces 2 will be leveraging Qt Quick with the capability of offloading graphics rendering to the GPU. However, this new version of KDE will not be dependent upon OpenGL acceleration and can fall-back to using an X RENDER code-path or CPU-based rendering.

Details in full from the recent Plasma development discussions can be found at dot.kde.org.