KDE Plasma Can Now Run On Wayland

An anonymous reader writes "With the upcoming KDE 4.11, there's an initial Wayland backend through the KWin manager. The author notes on his blog: 'Once the system is fully started you can just use it. If everything works fine, you should not even notice any difference, though there are still limitations, like only the three mouse buttons of my touchpad are supported ;-)'"

Re:Three mouse buttons?

[Darinbob]

The three button mouse was essentially the standard for years, it wasn't just Unix, but most desktop systems that allowed mouse input made use of three buttons since those mice were the most common. Before Windows took off, you basically only had 3 button mice or the macintosh with one button.

Re:you should not even notice any difference

[Plombo]

What is the point of developing software if it makes no difference?

The reason that there is no functional difference between this setup and a regular X11 setup is that KWin can't yet run as a Wayland compositor, because this support is a work in progress. The main difference from a technical standpoint is that X11 is not running as the root display server - KWin is running as a Wayland client rather than an X client. Weston, the reference Wayland server implementation, is being used as the system compositor and the root display server.

When KWin does get support for running as a Wayland compositor, there will be a real difference. Applications that can run as Wayland clients then be able to do so, and X11 clients will be handled using XWayland.

Re:you should not even notice any difference

[Plombo]

Sure it is. KWin can run as a Wayland client instead of an X client now. That's a big deal, and it indicates concrete progress on the transition to full Wayland support in KDE. How is that not newsworthy?