[SOLVED] Possibility of Wayland on Slackware?

1337_powerslacker · 05-21-2013, 03:31 PM

I noticed a blog entry by Aaron Seigo that says,if I understand it right, future versions of KDE will be based on Wayland, because of Wayland's more modern design (It was built from the ground up as a 3D compositor).

My question is, if KDE is the de-facto desktop of Slackware, what will that mean for the future of the X-server? Will it be relegated to /pasture or /extra, while Wayland becomes part of the default install? Or the other way around, with Wayland going into /testing, and X remaining part of the installation?

Pat, if you're looking at this, I would like to know your thoughts on this.Also, if anyone else has any ideas about this, please let me know. I should like to know how I must upgrade, if and when I want to upgrade my KDE version (4.9.5 at the moment), to the latest version.

Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it.

Matt

hitest · 05-21-2013, 04:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattallmill

Also, if anyone else has any ideas about this, please let me know.

Mr. Volkerding will decide if and when we move away from Xorg. We tend as a rule to take a conservative approach when it comes to adopting the next big thing.

Alien Bob · 05-21-2013, 04:06 PM

That switch to Wayland does not necessarily have to happen "soon."
Have a look at this page called "The Road to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2": http://vizzzion.org/blog/2013/01/the...-and-plasma-2/ from which I quote:

Quote:

Plans for KWin Plasma Compositor

Plasma Compositor refers, in a Wayland world, to the compositor used for Plasma workspaces, which is essentially KWin in disguise as Wayland compositor.
In KWin, we benefit from an ongoing effort to modularize and clean it up architecturally. For most of its UI, KWin already supports QML (Window decorations, tabswitcher, etc.). Some mechanisms which currenty work through XAtoms will need to be ported, the API impact of that will likely be quite limited for application developers.
The strategy for KWin is to port KWin to Qt 5, then make it possible to run KWin outside of an X server on top of KMS, using the graphics hardware more directly. The next step is to use KWin as compositor for Wayland display servers. The dependency of X11 can be removed once it is not needed anymore to provide compatibility with X11 applications, or can possibly be made optional.

Milestones for KWin (Martin Graesslin) (updated with further clarifications, thanks Martin):

KWin on Qt5 (work in progress, planned for 4.11): KWin will not depend on Qt 5 as of 4.11. The idea is to have KWin in a state that we could compile KWin with Qt 5/KF 5. But as it is unlikely that KF 5 will be allowed dependency for 4.11, we will not see a KWin on top of Qt 5 even if we achieve that goal. It’s a weak goal as we cannot release on it anyway.
on top of KMS (planned for 4.11): KWin in 4.11 will still run on top of the X-Server. This is mostly about adding a proof-of-concept. Whether that will be merged into 4.11 and compilation enabled will be seen once the code has been written. So in this case it will at most be an additional very hidden (env variable) mode for testing.
KWin as Wayland compositor (planned for 4.12): Again only as addition. As of 4.12 we will still be targetting X-Server as default. If we succeed we might add an option. But this pretty much depends on the state of Qt 5/KF 5 and QtCompositor. If any of those dependencies is not ready to depend on, the code might exist, but will not be released.
no X11 dependency (planned for the distant future): There are no plans to drop X11 support. But we want to have the possibility to build a KWin without X for new targets like Plasma Active. For the desktop there are no such plans.

Don't worry about your upgrade strategies.

Eric

volkerdi · 05-21-2013, 04:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattallmill

I noticed a blog entry by Aaron Seigo that says,if I understand it right, future versions of KDE will be based on Wayland, because of Wayland's more modern design (It was built from the ground up as a 3D compositor).

I don't think you understood this blog post right. It's actually talking about KDM (or a possible replacement), and that one of the requirements in the next major revision of KDE based on Qt5 will be that it needs to support Wayland as an option.

I've not seen anything suggesting that KDE would drop support for X.Org in the foreseeable future.

ReaperX7 · 05-21-2013, 08:31 PM

Even then we don't know if Wayland will pan out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by From Wayland's FAQ

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
Is wayland replacing the X server?

It could replace X as the native Linux graphics server, but I'm sure X will always be there on the side. I imagine that Wayland and X will coexist in two ways on a Linux desktop: Wayland is a graphics multiplexer for a number of X servers. Linux today typically only uses one X server for GDM and the user session, but we'll probably see that move to a dedicated GDM X server, an X server for user sessions (spawning more on the fly as more users log in) and maybe a dedicated screensaver/unlock X server. Right now we rely on VT switching to move between X servers, and it's horrible. We have no control over what the transitions look like and the VT ioctls are pretty bad. Wayland provides a solution here, in that it can host several X servers as they push their root window to Wayland as surfaces. The compositor in this case will be a dedicated session switcher that will cross-fade between X servers or spin them on a cube.

Further down the road we run a user session natively under Wayland with clients written for Wayland. There will still (always) be X applications to run, but we now run these under a root-less X server that is itself a client of the Wayland server. This will inject the X windows into the Wayland session as native looking clients. The session Wayland server can run as a nested Wayland server under the system Wayland server described above, maybe even side by side with X sessions. There's a number of intermediate steps, such as running the GNOME screen saver as a native wayland client, for example, or running a composited X desktop, where the compositor is a Wayland client, pushing the composited desktop to Wayland.

More or less it reads as if it could replace X11, but also that it and X11 could possibly co-exist, or maybe even merge together. However you take it remains to be seen as how the final draft will arrive.

1337_powerslacker · 05-22-2013, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by volkerdi

I don't think you understood this blog post right. It's actually talking about KDM (or a possible replacement), and that one of the requirements in the next major revision of KDE based on Qt5 will be that it needs to support Wayland as an option.

I've not seen anything suggesting that KDE would drop support for X.Org in the foreseeable future.

Thanks, Pat. I was worried that I might have to break my working setup on account of KDE. I'm glad that I misunderstood the article. I like my setup just the way it is, and am not crazy about anything which could make my computing experience less than satisfactory, which it is now.

To Alien Bob, Reaper X7, and others - Thanks for the input. You set my mind at ease. I think I'll hold on to this setup for a good while longer.

Take care

Matt