Wayland: New Live KDE ISO and Server-side Decorations
Jonathan Riddell today announced the first Plasma Wayland Live Image so everyone can test drive the new graphics server. Riddell added this is a milestone release because Wayland is able to run a full session including applications. Martin Graesslin joined the conversation by saying server-side window decorations are coming to Wayland early next year.
Riddell wrote that users of the live DVD will "notice some obvious glitches" but all the goodies should be "appreciated by everybody." I didn't have too much luck myself. I did get to the desktop I think, but nothing else materialized. I did see the wallpaper and a pointer. It may be been my dual monitors that threw it off. One screen had the full screen background, but the other monitor had a small section of background and a lot of black. It looked like it was trying to do a clone, but perhaps Wayland is cardist against NVIDIAs or something.
it is certainly not ready for everyday use yet, but the advantages of more secure workspaces, easier feature extendibility and graphics free of tearing and gitches will be appreciated by everybody. Work on this has been ongoing since 2011 and is expected to take years rather than months before a completely transparent switch away from X will be possible.
For those luckier than me may be interested in knowing that Martin Gräßlin today blogged that server-side window decorations will hit repos early next year. Gräßlin said that client-side decorations are "an inferior solution" and Qt's implementation is "ugly and lack important features like a difference between active and inactive windows."
So Gräßlin wrote a "protocol to negotiate whether a window should have server-, client-side or no decoration which got added to KWayland. KWin got an implementation for that both as server and client." He then said he'd submit it after the new year.
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