[kde-linux] Wayland!

[Kevin Krammer]

On Tuesday, 2016-06-07, 00:47:57, Duncan wrote:

> 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.)

I wouldn't expect applications to lag a lot, most should be working fine 
already with Wayland.

There could be the one or another feature that relies on some X11 specifcs or 
on some platform integration that the Qt Wayland plugin doesn't offer yet, but 
I don't think these are very common.

The majority of the work happens on the workspace side, i.e. for KDE in 
Plasma/KWin/etc., since this is now the place where certain features need to 
be provided from that had previously been provided by the X server.

Lets take for example KWrite or even some complex application like Kontact.
Most of their functionality is internal to the program or handled via non-ui 
communicaton channels (e.g. files, sockets).

The things they do need from the surrounding environment and which might not 
be available yet are things like cross-application copy&paste or cross-
application drag&drop, basically communicating with other applications via 
channels of the graphics system.

These channels need first to be provided by the shell(s) and support for the 
respective protocols need to become available in the toolkits.

My understanding is that copy&paste for example is already available, so 
KWrite running as a Wayland client might only be missing the functionality to 
drag a file into it.
And it will regain that once the shell(s) and Qt implement it, so also not 
something that KWrite developers would have to spend resources on.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-linux/attachments/20160608/2c2383c9/attachment.sig>