A KDE Wayland session is closer to reality

Oct 9, 2015 03:14 GMT  ·  By

On October 8, Martin Gräßlin, a KDE Developer working for BlueSystems GmbH, reported on the work done for porting the modern KDE Plasma compositor and window manager to the next-generation Wayland display server.

According to Mr. Gräßlin, the team responsible of the port of KDE Plasma to the Wayland display server worked very hard during the month of September in their endless attempt to bring the desktop environment and all of its core components on par with the latest Wayland technologies.

They managed to implement a host of new features, such as transient windows in KWayland, making all of KDE Plasma's menus to open at the right position. Because of this feature alone, the KDE Wayland session is now much closer to leaving the development stage and becoming reality.

"One of the biggest oddities when trying out Plasma on Wayland in the 5.4 release is the fact that menus open at random positions," says Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of KDE Plasma compositor and window manager. "The reason for this is that KWin applied it’s placing strategy on it and ignored the hints provided by the window."

Additionally, Mr. Gräßlin notes the fact that the KDE developers managed to extend KWindowSystem's abstraction to Wayland, to add support for multiple X11 servers in KWindowSystem, which will land in KDE Frameworks 5.15 soon, as well as to prepare the KWin window manager for the cloud.