KDE's Future Will be Wayland

KDE's Martin Grasslin blogged today that despite what the rest of the industry/community does, KDE's future will be on Wayland. He said he and his fellow developers decided to travel the road more annoying, if not by choice by process of elimination.

It's been interesting to follow the various desktop camps as they discuss the future of their software in relation to desktop graphical servers. Xorg has been the recipient of some mighty harsh words as far back as when it was still XFree. GNOME already stated their interest in developing for Wayland and Grasslin thinks even the smaller projects will move away from X as well. Basically, Grasslin thinks Wayland is the future.

However, he did say it would be a while before the switch is thrown officially. Plasma Workspaces 2 will still be based on X while developers wrangle the Qt 5 migration. But understand, they "all agree that our future will be on Wayland and even if we use X as the windowing system our primary focus is on Wayland."

Grasslin was actually posting about the relationship between KWin and Plasma, and the crux of that is KDE "will develop all our integration bits in a way that one could replace KWin by a different Wayland compositor, even if that is just a theoretical option." So folks might still use Compiz should it support Wayland.

But to regular KDE users, our question is will NVIDIA support Wayland. Once upon a time, NVIDIA said no way no how, but back last fall they said they'd consider it. This recent thread on the NVIDIA forums should shake every KDE user to their core. One developer said outright, "NVIDIA couldn't care less to support it." Yikes. He then added, "use nouveau."

Wayland is being developed for nouveau and, in fact, requires it. And it seems there are third party patches for nouveau to run on Wayland (oh joy!). And for part-time gamers, it's nice to know "some 3D acceleration exists" in nouveau.