Posted on by Martin Flöser

An update on KDE on Wayland

Now that I have your attention 🙂 To get Plasma running on Wayland we first need Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. An important part of going to Frameworks 5 is libplasma2. At the moment we are preparing a developer sprint in Randa to make libplasma2 happen. You can read more about the importance of this sprint in sebas’s blog post.

KDE has started a fund raising campaign to make this sprint possible. But we are still lacking around 2000 EUR at the time of this writing and just a little bit more than 200 people participated in this fund raising.

Now you are probably interested in getting a real update on the work which happened over the last year in the efforts to bring KDE (in particular KWin) to Wayland and I really want to provide it to you so that you don’t have to rely on articles about an informal chat over lunch. But I’m currently lacking motivation to write such a blog post. I think I would be much more motivated to write such a post if when I get home this evening from XDC I see our fund raising succeeded. It would show me that people really want to see progress in the KDE Plasma workspaces.

19 Replies to “An update on KDE on Wayland”

  1. I am sure those that are able to contribute, contribute…
    Not all the users live in highly evolved countries.
    I observed that people from this countries don’t realize that almost all the world is actually is doing pretty poorly.
    For example, I am a student in the poorest country in Europe. People with 80-120$ per month(that’s the average salary) can’t really afford anything else than food and pay for utilities.
    Don’t be upset of people not donating cause not every user lives in USA, Canada, Australia and a few countries from Europe that are doing better.

      1. And from those users, just part of them read developer blogs.
        I should of said “Those that are able to contribute and know about this sprint”.

  2. Hi Martin, I am a user of KDE and would love to contribute 50.00NZD towards funding, however I dont want to create an account with the website and I dont have a paypal account.

    Would there be an international bank account number that I could use my internet banking to donate towards this sprint?

    Regards

    MATT

    1. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any details about whether there are other options to support this fund raising campaign. We have got the feedback about paypal quite often and we will probably consider this the next time.

      As far as I have heard it should be possible to donate without creating an account.

    2. You can donate without registering and withou a paypal account. Click on the bottom right link in the frame that appears when you click on the donate button.

  3. I donated but still feel blackmailed 🙂
    I’d love to see the fund raising campaign finish successfully but 10 000 Euro is a huge amount.

    1. Not really, imho – if you think about it. KDE has literally millions of users. The problem is that we don’t REACH them! And that is where YOU also can help – not just by money but by helping us to reach people we can’t reach ourselves!

  5. Perhaps an idea for German people:
    Make it possible to donate to KDE e.V. and the KDE e.V. should forward the money to a specific project. This has the advantage that the giver can make a simple money transfer to a back account and he can have a tax refund.

  6. In my opinion (and opinions differ, I respect that) this type of post – which there have been several of lately – is not beneficial to KDE as such. KDE is free software.

    Yes, there are many users living in countries with a high standard of living. And I am sure many of us could contribute more to free software. However, don’t forget that there’s also a whole bunch of takers. Just a quick list off the top of my head:
    – Randa Meetings on Pledgie
    – “Join the Game” campaign
    – Nepomuk on Pledgie
    – Digikam
    – Amarok
    – Wikipedia
    – OpenStreetMap
    – Skrooge
    – Merkartoor

    I do not disagree with asking for donations, but there is a difference between asking and nagging. Many thousand euros have been raised for the Randa meetings. I am quite impressed.

    However, and this is something you have to consider too: When I look at the money I have donated to free software the last couple of years it is adding up to a bit. Probably more than I would have spend on software if I had bought a MacBook instead of a ThinkPad and just not cared about free software.
    For mee the free part of free software is more important than the gratis part of it, and I think supporting free software it is the right thing to do for a lot of reasons, but you have to respect that not everyone is willing to pay extra for free software.

    So, in respect of your users and supporters, feel free to ask for donations, but stop nagging us! And I hope you get in a good mood tonight.

    Besides, if you could charge insanely high prices for devices loaded with Plasma Active like Apple can for their phones and tablets, you could use the net income to fund Randa and more – so get those Vivaldi tablets shipping and don’t even think about competing based on price with Android tablets 🙂

    1. First of all, your support is really appreciated! It makes a huge difference, not only in making meetings possible but also in terms of motivation for our developers.

      Now on the note of ‘many fishing in the same pond’, yes, that is true. However – when we think about it, that pond is HUGE – we just all fish in the same area 😉

      What I mean to say is that KDE has millions of users – we just don’t managed to reach them with this fund raiser. I really hope we can do better next time as this is something we continue to have to do to keep our finances healthy. And any ideas, tips and help on reaching those folks who we didn’t reach this time is VERY much appreciated!

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