Goals/Wayland

Intro

KDE community has elected to finalize the transition to Wayland and embrace the future of desktop.

Wayland has been of great interest and effort to the KDE community as it aligns with its values and goals to produce software that is secure, lightweight and beautiful. See more about Wayland in our Wayland page.

Wayland logo

This goal will prioritize tracking down and fixing the issues that keep our software from achieving feature parity with the venerable X Window system. Our focus will be our own community software--KWin, Plasma and Apps--but will also be about helping the wider free software community to advance the Wayland feature set.

This is an ambitious goal. It cannot be a small team effort, and we invite the wider community to participate.

How to help

There are a few ways to help this goal, some requiring no specialized skills.

Bug triaging

In order to fix bugs, we need to have precise reporting. Often we need to reproduce the issues reported, verify that bug reports include relevant information, request additional information, etc.

All of those actions are essential to the community to be able to fix the issues, and anyone can help. See the reported Wayland bugs that you can help triage.

Testing

You can run plasma or a KDE Application and report an issue you've encountered in the bug tracker and mark it with the keyword "wayland". You don't need a Wayland session to test apps in Wayland; just startplasma-wayland dolphin to try it out within Wayland. (In Plasma 5.16 and older use startplasmacompositor instead of startplasma-wayland.)

Developing

There are different ways you can contribute with code. First, set up a developer environment; Start your journey with kdesrc-build kwin! Then pick a Wayland bug from among the known bugs and give it a shot. For an especially impactful contribution, knock out one of the Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers! The wayland porting notes may be helpful.

Documentation

We have a few documentation pages to help with debugging and fixing bugs:

• For Wayland debugging tips and general information
• For app developers and maintainers we have a documentation to help porting to Wayland
• For new developer contributors wanting to start hacking

KDE community projects

KWin and KWayland

KWin is the KDE Wayland compositor, representing the main component establishing a Wayland session. KWayland is an essential library wrapping low-level Wayland API to higher-level Qt-Style API. Their work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/98/

Plasma

Plasma needs a lot of integration with Wayland and KWin to provide a smooth experience. Its Wayland work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/99/

Apps

KDE has many great applications and we want to make sure they work flawlessly under Wayland. We will be helping the apps contributors testing and fixing their Wayland support.

Upstream projects

libinput

Libinput is the input library for Wayland, and a major dependency of Plasma and a few of our apps. We will probably need to work upstream to achieve our goal.

Qt and QtWayland

Qt is the main framework upon which most of KDE software is built. As we have advanced needs, we might encounter issues or limitations with Qt or QtWayland (the Wayland integration Qt module) in which case we will work with the Qt community to address them.

SDDM

SDDM is our main desktop manager and will need some contribution of our community to take full advantage of wayland.

Currently reported Wayland bugs

You can find open bugs associated with Wayland keyword with this query.

You can find bugs with Wayland mentioned in their title with this other query.

Contact

You can reach for the people involved on KWin mailing and #kwin IRC channel on freenode. kwin gitlab is where a lot of work happens and could be used to contact the team.

Find us:

• Matrix: https://go.kde.org/matrix/#/#kde-wayland-goal:kde.org
• IRC: #kde-wayland-goal on liberachat.