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 ;-)'"

Beware!

[Lunix Nutcase]

Wayland-Yutani: Building better display servers.

Predicates

[TechyImmigrant]

Predicates are great, they let you be right even though you're not.
E.G: "If everything works fine, you should not even notice any difference"

This is true, but it doesn't tell you whether or not you will notice any difference, it just gives you the predicate under which you will not but doesn't walk the walk of telling you it will work fine.

Re:

[sed quid in infernos]

There's still useful information in that sentence: It's possible Wayland could work as intended, but cause noticable changes in system behavior. This sentence tells us that the expected behavior is no noticable difference. And the sentence also filters out some useless information: of course you'd notice a difference if it doesn't work. That's the trivial case.

Re:

[AvitarX]

Which is a shame, because Wayland was supposed to address weird bad behaviors.

Re:

[Lunix Nutcase]

The "weird, bad behaviors" would be due to the experimental backend not Wayland. The dev's point was to simply to temper expectations that there will be bugs and issues in the code.

Three mouse buttons?

[unixisc]

That brings to mind some of the old SunOS and Ultrix workstations that we had in college, which had 3 mouse buttons. Somewhat wierd to handle, particularly when using the 4th finger to right click. Subsequent versions replaced the middle button w/ the mouse click of both left & right, but I'm sure that broke plenty of software that used a combination of left-middle or middle-right. Not to mention Ctrl-left-middle or Alt-right-middle or things like that.

TFA - so does KDE 4.10 already run on Wayland? Or will it be KDE 5.x? That thing seems to need Wayland as well - not just Plasma.

Re:Three mouse buttons?

[crazyaxemaniac]

TFA - so does KDE 4.10 already run on Wayland? Or will it be KDE 5.x? That thing seems to need Wayland as well - not just Plasma.

This experimental backend is in KDE 4.11. Martin Gräßlin says that X11 clients communicate with KWin and Kwin renders them to the running wayland compositor, weston. Other than the input limitation mentioned in the summary the other problem is that Kwin cannot yet act as a wayland compositor itself and cannot manage wayland clients. I guess if you launched a wayland client in this environment you would have to have weston manage it for you.

Re:

[slim]

Eh? I couldn't manage without three mouse buttons in Windows, today. The scroll wheel, of course, doubles as a button.

Middle-click is "paste" in an Xterm.

Re:Three mouse buttons?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Agree. I haven't told my coworker who is from a MacOS (not to be confused with OS X) background about the wheel click since he was apprehensive about "right-clicks". I didn't want blow his mind.

Re:

[Lunix Nutcase]

This might be shocking to you but you've been able to use mice with more than one button with Macs for ages.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that is why the Mac OS OS X difference was stressed.

Re:

[YukariHirai]

Except that even in Mac OS 9 it was possible to use a mouse with more than one button.

Re:

[copponex]

Easy, buddy. Back in the day it was an old joke:

Fanboi: Name one thing that your PC can do that my Mac can't!!
Operator: Right-click.

Today's analog is:

Fanboi: Name one thing that your Android can do that my iPhone can't!!
Operator: Run applications without Apple's permission.

Re:

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Not a shock but also not relevant to my coworker.

Re:

[Bearhouse]

Eh? I couldn't manage without three mouse buttons in Windows, today. The scroll wheel, of course, doubles as a button.

Middle-click is "paste" in an Xterm.

*strokes beard*

FTFY ;)

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:

[Lunix Nutcase]

This is an experimental Wayland backend for KWin.

Re:

[Plombo]

This is subtly different. In the scenario you describe, KWin was running as an X client using XWayland under Weston. In the KDE Wayland backend, KWin runs as a native Wayland client without the XWayland compatiblity layer.

you should not even notice any difference

[manu0601]

If everything works fine, you should not even notice any difference

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

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:

[manu0601]

When KWin does get support for running as a Wayland compositor, there will be a real difference

In other words, today's change was not worth a news?

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?