D12820: Add KWayland virtual desktop protocol

[Martin Flöser]

graesslin added inline comments.

INLINE COMMENTS

> mart wrote in org_kde_plasma_virtual_desktop.xml:45
> the virtualdesktop would then have an output property used for filtering?
> or, the layout event could be kept in the manager, but be not just rows and column, but pass the pair output and actual vector containing the virtualdesktop instances?
> 
> also if it is per output then two desktops can be on the same row/column, as long as they are on different outputs..
> then also all the api for requesting/notifying activate/deactivate would need an output parameter.. /o\
> 
> My primary use for this protocol was to make activities==virtual desktops (the quick way would be to just use the activity ids as desktop ids and use kactivitymanager to add/remove, so no need for api to ask kwin to add/remove desktops)
> this clashes a bit with different desktops per output, tough could be solved if i then make the activity id a separate property in the Virtualdesktop interface...

Please note that your quick way would not work. Activities are disabled in KWin Wayland and I don't see them getting enabled again. Activities resulted in hard freezes several times and I don't trust them due to that. As maintainer I would need very convincing arguments on why activities won't break KWin again. Due to the fact that kamd speaks both dbus and windowing protocol I don't see a chance that KWin can rely on it.

Due to the fact that activities used to block KWin it's an area which is completely not ported to Wayland yet. A Wayland window cannot be put on an activity. So this would require a significant amount of work. This also doesn't match anything we have in KWin to move forward. Activities have been in an unmaintained state since the start and the code is in a really bad state. None of the core KWin developers have touched it in the last year's. It's just a bad copy and paste of virtual desktops without any understanding of the domain. I do not want to see any future code being based on that. In KWin we started to evolve virtual desktops, so that in future it would be possible to implement the feature set of activities in virtual desktops. But for the time being it would mean X11 identifiers, that is numerical desktops.

I put know out an interesting question: do we need layouts?

REPOSITORY
  R127 KWayland

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D12820

To: mart, #kwin, #plasma, graesslin, hein
Cc: zzag, bshah, romangg, kde-frameworks-devel, michaelh, ngraham, bruns
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