KDE Working in Wayland

Wayland is a new graphical server that is well positioned to replace the aging X Server currently in use on most Linux desktop systems. KDE spokesmen have said that they will not be supporting Mir, Canonical's answer to Wayland and X; but have demonstrated interest in Wayland. Well, today Martin Gräßlin said he's got KWin working on Wayland.

Gräßlin said it's highly experimental and "not intended for productive usage." Nevertheless, "This week there will be the release of KDE SC 4.11 Beta 1 and this will come with an interesting new feature: an experimental Wayland backend inside KWin."

As Gräßlin explains it:

This backend does not allow to manage Wayland clients, but uses another Wayland compositor as the rendering target. Instead of rendering to an X window, KWin renders to a Wayland surface. From an architecture point of view this means that there is a Wayland system compositor and KWin is running as a Wayland session compositor (although KWin is not yet a Wayland compositor).

I'm not so excited about all these new fangled do-dads anymore, but if you still skate the bleeding edge see Gräßlin's full post, posted from KWin on Wayland btw, for instructions on how to use this new toy.