Try Wayland on KDE?

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1

Hi,

just wanted to see if someone can point me at a ‘how-to’ to try Wayland on KDE. I can see some useful (early days) info on Martin Gräßlin’s blog, but nothing newer. I see allot about GNOME and Wayland, but I gather it’s fairly well supported on Plasma 5.4.x as well.

Apologies if this exists someplace and my google-fu was insufficient to find it. Thanks in advance!

Russ.

2

Not really, I think.
AIUI, it will be fairly well supported in 5.5, but there still are caveats.

And AFAIK there is no “easy” way to use it, (a lot of) manual tinkering is required.
I cannot even give you hints though…

3

Thanks anyway - I wanted to have a play, not to break my system (if support’s still that early!) I’ll wait a while longer. Thx!

4

I have a test install of the Kaos distro (a rolling Plasma 5 distro). They are usually a little ahead of opensuse, but without the openQA testing.

They do have experimental support for Plasma 5 under Wayland. So I tried it earlier today.

I logged into Wayland/Plasma 5. Three Kcrash windows popped up telling me that Kwin had crashed. I closed two of those, then clicked “Restart” on the third. Three more crash windows showed up.

So I right clicked on the desktop, so as to logout. Nothing happened.

I tried CTRL-ALT-DEL, and got the logout screen. I clicked “Logout”, but nothing happened.

So I tried CTRL-ALT-F1, etc. I think it was CTRL-ALT-F3 that gave me a login screen. I logged in as root, and did “shutdown -r now” (which actually worked).

I’m thinking that KDE/Wayland isn’t ready for prime time.

5

You can also

Note that on openSUSE, you can install as many Desktops as you want, and openSUSE will figure out how everything co-exists. If you then disable auto-login you can choose which Desktop you want for that session when you enter your User credentials.

TSU

6

As Plasma 5.5 has been released now, this might interest you…

Martin Graesslin, one of the main KWin developers, wrote this mail today to warn distributions about installing the now included KDE/Wayland session by default:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/2015-December/009215.html

Here’s the mentioned “Known Issues” section:
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/5.5_Errata#KWin_Wayland

7

Something else for people considering Wayland to take into account…

My first install of Enlightment (which has Wayland installed) was on fairly old hardware.
Wayland may enable a number of visual enhancements but I found that you also need sufficient hardware, Wayland isn’t going to necessarily be more efficient enabling new capabilities on older video hardware.

TSU

8

I’ve gotten as far as getting it to try and run, but haven’t yet been able to get it past crashing at the progress/loading screen.

To add it to SDDM, you need to set up a .desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions with the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=wayland-session
Exec=/usr/bin/startplasmacompositor
TryExec=/usr/bin/startplasmacompositor
DesktopNames=KDE
Name=Wayland
Comment=Wayland session by KDE
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=5.3.95

Then you need to go edit
usr/bin/startplasmacompositor and change the appropriate variable-kajigger to the following:

qdbus=$qbindir/qdbus-qt5

And then you need to open up YaST2, search for “Wayland” and install the not-already-installed Wayland related packages - I went ahead and installed everything that wasn’t 32-bit or -devel to be on the safe side.

That’ll get you to a point where you can at least open Konsole, run “startplasmacompositor” and get a window to run programs in by opening another Konsole window and entering *“appname -platform wayland”.

*To try and get the entire KDE ecosystem running (maybe it’ll work for you, doesn’t here):

Logout, from the SDDM screen go to a TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and log in. Enter the following command:

export $(dbus-launch)

and then you can either try running it via the

startplasmacompositor

command as before, or return to SDDM (Ctrl+Alt+F7) and log in from there.

Hope this helps.

9

I fired up my Kaos install, which updated to 5.5 yesterday. So I tried a Wayland login.

It actually worked. But login was very slow, and logout was very slow. I have the panel set to auto-hide, but it doesn’t hide under Wayland. Apart from that, I didn’t see any problems. But I did not do much testing. This is with Intel graphics (Haswell, I think), and presumably using SNA acceleration unless Kaos has changed that (I didn’t check).