KDE Neon dev/unstable switching to Wayland by default

During this year’s Akademy we had a few discussions about Wayland, and the Plasma and Neon team decided to switch Neon developer unstable edition to Wayland by default soonish.

There are still a few things in the stack which need to be shaken out – we need a newer Xwayland in Neon, we want to wait for Plasma 5.8 to be released, we need to get the latest QtWayland 5.7 build, etc. etc.

This is really exciting. It’s probably the biggest step towards Wayland by default the KDE community has ever taken. I hope that other continuous delivery systems will follow so that we can get many enthusiastic users to try Wayland.

35 Replies to “KDE Neon dev/unstable switching to Wayland by default”

  1. I guess that leaves all nvidia driver users out of luck?

    What are you using for login manager? Does sddm greeter support wayland yet?

    1. I guess that leaves all nvidia driver users out of luck?

      Of course not. That’s part of the things what still needs to be done. We need to ensure that nvidia users still have X by default. We have ideas for it. Please trust us to not be stupid and to understand the problem in general 🙂

        1. I think you did not understand this properly: for nvidia users nothing will change, they will have X by default. For other users on dev/unstable (neither dev/stable, nor the user edition) only the default will be changed.

    1. What about the same set of patches for nvidia like they added to Weston?

      AFAIK these patches are not merged. As long as Weston doesn’t accept that we won’t consider such an approach.

      1. Weston devs have an ideological feud with Nvidia and it’s just the reference compositor; EGLStream is still Wayland. Can we at least consider pushing Wayland adoption forward or are we going to be like GNU/Hurd forever?

        1. I’m extremely pragmatic here: I don’t want two code paths to do the same thing. It’s not ideological or anything. It’s completely an pragmatic approach on what do we have manpower to maintain for. One code path: yes, two code paths: no. So we are waiting to see whether this settles and we don’t want to create pressure on other compositors by supporting it. We are keeping out of that.

  2. seeing you mention the need for qtwayland 5.7 build ive gotten curious to know if kde and the qt company has decided to work together where it regards to qt and wayland working together

  3. I am glad to see that KDE and Wayland is moving forward, but I like others have Nvidia hardware, so I hope the Nvidia devs get onboard with the Wayland devs.

  4. I don’t understand, why people, who have nvidia GPU lament.
    Open drivers have support for Wayland.
    Neon KDE it is experimental(unstable?) distro for test new KDE – please read before use.
    It is good decision to turn on Wayland by default, maybe next Debian stable will have KDE 5 with it.

    1. The open drivers for Nvidia GPUs are very incomplete and don’t match the proprietary one’s performance (nor does any other driver for either Intel or AMD get even close), stability or capabilities.

      The Nvidia prop driver *does* support Wayland, but they require a different implementation from the one used in Mesa.

        1. >The Nvidia driver does *not* support standard Wayland compositors

          But it supports Wayland, as much as you twist what I said. It just doesn’t support Mesa’s implementation.

  5. I’m not (currently) using KDE, but I definitely; as of today, have made the switch to Wayland from X.org.

    In my case, I am using Gnome. I was going to try one of the Wayland-specific Desktops, but ultimately decided to just use Gnome since I was already using it. Wayland seems to be in really good shape these days, with only the odd sore spot. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with XWayland, all of my Qt apps like Meshlab, Cloudcompare all start up fast and work as expected.

    I’ll have to take KDE for spin sometime, as It’s been a year or so. I always appreciated the customization level in KDE and Qt is obviously awesome… Hopefully, Nvidia will step up to the plate and get proper wayland support in their driver… I’m currently using intel on my main PC, but I had been considering picking up an Nvidia card sometime soon.

    best of luck on getting Neon switched over to Wayland!

  6. Martin, an offtopic.

    Will it be possible to use different DPI per display?
    For example, I have 15″ 1080p laptop and 23″ 1080p external screen. DPI on the ext. screen is just fine, but on laptop everything is very very small and hard to read.

    So question, in general is if it will be possible to set, for instance, 120 DPI to laptop’s screen and 90 DPI to extenal screen? or may be it’s already possible with Xorg?

    1. Yes with Wayland it will be possible and AFAIK GNOME already supports it. We still need to hook up a few things here and there. With X I’m not aware of that being possible.

  7. Hi Martin.

    Do you plan to implement relative pointer / pointer containment in KWin on Wayland? Or it’s already implemented? If not, is there some bug to track this issue?

    1. It’s not yet implemented, but quite high on my todo list. It won’t make it to Plasma 5.8 as our depending frameworks version is already released. I expect that I’ll get to it pretty early in the 5.9 cycle.

  8. Since GNOME as favoured by Fedora in my opinion is rather a poor compromise between a handsome GUI and a proper battlefield for Wayland development I’m enchanted from seeing there’s a hopeful as well as a powered team eventually getting the KDE closer to working on Wayland, too. For KDE’s configurability isn’t reached anywhere else!
    Though me, I prefer the system body of Fedora because of it’s certainly very best dependency resolution on package management by DNF. However, development experience will swap over from one distro to others, so the result may finally leave all users as winners. Be the Ancients with ye!

  9. Plasma (Wayland) session NEON devunstable: Discover does not render properly and I have to use apt in a konsole session. System Settings has some rendering issues also, and Spectacle does not work. When will these be fully functional in Wayland?

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