Native Plasma shell running on Wayland tech demo

Jun 18, 2015 06:05 GMT  ·  By

Sebastian Kügler published a few days ago a new video on his YouTube channel about a demonstration of KDE's native Plasma shell interface running on the Wayland display server, as showcased by Martin Gräßlin.

It would appear that, thanks to the latest work implemented in the current snapshot of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, it is now possible to run its shell (user interface) natively on top of the next-generation Wayland display server.

"Wayland progress! In this video, Martin Gräßlin shows KDE's Plasma shell running natively on a Wayland display server implemented in KWin. This is now possible with the latest code from KDE's Git repositories - and it's highly experimental," says Sebastian Kügler, a KDE Plasma hacker and developer.

In the video, you can also see a demo of seamless integration of X11 applications, such as the KWrite text editor rendering over XWayland extension, and the KWin window manager now supports X11 clients transparently, which means that it is fully backwards compatible.

The KDE development team is hard at work these days fixing any bugs (you can see some of them in the video below) that they encounter with porting the KDE Plasma shell to Wayland, as well as implementing new features. We will keep you updated once we have more information.