Linux Pro Magazine article about Wayland adoption

[Martin Flöser]

Hi Bruce,

sorry for the late reply, I only spotted your note right now. I'm the 
Wayland maintainer in Plasma.

Am 2017-10-09 23:43, schrieb Bruce Byfield:
> Hi:
> 
> I'm preparing an article on distros' adoption of Wayland. I was hoping
> to have answers to a few questions:
> 
> - What is the state of Wayland development in Plasma?

It pretty much depends on what users do with their system whether 
Wayland is suited for them or not. Overall we are very close to have 
everything working. But there are still some general problems which we 
as the community cannot solve. For example if your workflow depends on 
TeamViewer you won't be able to use Wayland as Wayland security 
mechanisms prevent that.

Personally I have been using Wayland as my daily driver for more than 
1.5 years now. I do all my hacking on Wayland, so it is useable and in 
general working.

> 
> - Are there any obstacles in Plasma or perhaps Qt that prevent
>   Wayland from being used by average users in KDE?

You are lucky: just yesterday I started to setup a wiki page with the 
current show stoppers: 
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

> 
> - How will the user experience of Wayland differ from that of the X
>   Window system?

If we get it right: not at all. The user experience will be better (e.g. 
no tearing). But users won't notice that things get better, only if 
things get worse.

> 
> - When Wayland is introduced, will a fallback to X be available?

Of course. We have no plans to drop X11.

> 
> - Is there a tentative schedule for Wayland's release?

No.

> 
> - Is there anything else that you would like to say.

If you give a try with a live cd consider using either openSUSE 
Tumbleweed or KDE Neon dev/unstable. In most parts we need super recent 
software. E.g. Qt 5.9.1 gives a bad experience, but the just released 
5.9.2 should be much better. Similar get the most recent XWayland, etc. 
Also the unstable release contains support for XDG Shell which is 
required for GTK.

If you have any further questions, please ask.

Cheers
Martin