KDE sets its sights on Wayland

Following the GNOME developers' decision to focus on porting their desktop environment to the Wayland display server, the KDE project has also indicated that it will go ahead with a Wayland port of its own project. Currently, the developers are debating which display manager will be used in the port. KDM, the display manager the project is using currently, has apparently already been discounted in favour of LightDM or possibly the QML-based SDDM.

Both KDE and GNOME had recently been relatively silent on their respective Wayland ports and interest in the alternative to X11 also seemed to have waned with regards to implementation plans from Linux distributions. Canonical's announcement of its own X11 replacement, Mir, seems to have brought with it renewed activity. As part of its Mir announcement, Canonical had vocally rejected the concepts that form the basis of Wayland, saying that it recreates too many semantics of X itself. The company's announcement had caused far-reaching discussions within the Wayland project and many parts of the Linux community.

With KDE and GNOME both firmly deciding to support Wayland, Ubuntu's Unity remains the only major desktop environment currently committed to eschewing Wayland and X11 for Mir.

(fab)