[kde-linux] Wayland!

[Duncan]

David Baron posted on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 10:19:07 +0300 as excerpted:

> A lot of these packages are getting installed as part of routine
> upgrades,
> i.e. in Debian Sid.
> 
> Are we going over to Wayland?
> How does this work with current Xorg?
> Safe to even start with this right now?

I had the same question some months ago...

Current kde/plasma5 actually requires the wayland libs to build and link 
against, now.  It doesn't mean you actually run wayland at all yet, tho 
that's possible but not yet recommended as it's still a pretty rough 
experience.

While current release requires wayland, I'm actually running the gentoo/
kde project overlay's live-git packages here (tho I moved a few days ago 
and haven't updated yet since), and pretty regularly read the new 
activity in the git logs as I update.  Wayland development is quite 
active in the core, primarily kwin, with supporting commits elsewhere in 
the frameworks and plasma components when needed to test the new kwin 
code on wayland.  A lot of kwin code has been moved around and refactored 
in ordered to split functionality into the various components so the 
wayland code is separate from the traditional xorg/opengl, which is 
separate again from the newer egl, and common code is again separate in 
its own files as well.  Additionally, there's a focus on libinput, which 
as I understand it is a relatively new option on xorg, but will be the 
primary (only?) input mechanism on wayland.

Anyway, before the refactoring, the early wayland code was pretty much 
intermingled, thus the requirement for it now even when it's not expected 
to be run.  But when the refactoring is complete, it seems to me that it 
should again be possible to build a "pure" xorg plasma, not pulling in 
wayland at all, if that's desired.  And similarly, eventually it should 
be possible to do the same with wayland, tho there's going to be enough 
not yet ported xorg apps that will be run in a rootless-X inside wayland 
for quite some time, that it'll be awhile before a wayland-only build 
will be practical for many.

In fact, just as kde4 was a transition between the old kde-only 
configuration for most legacy apps and the XDG-spec config was pretty 
much limited to new ones, and only with kde/frameworks/plasma5 are apps 
generally fully transitioned to the XDG-spec, I'd expect a lot of 
generation 5 (k5) apps to continue to be xorg only, and that many may not 
actually transition to wayland until k6, with some being left behind in 
the process, just as some k3 apps got left behind and didn't make k4, and 
some k3/k4 apps (like superkaramba, unfortunately one of my personal 
favorites) aren't being ported to k5.  (Superkaramba only remains 
available in its k4 form and has been dropped from further development, 
so will eventually break and fail to build any more with modern tools and 
against modern libs.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman