As a kind of Christmas present to our Wayland users I’m happy to announce that over the last two weeks I worked on adding support for server-side decorations.

The main motivations for working on it was the fact that I want to switch to Wayland as primary driver for my system and the nested KWin running on top of another Wayland server, which I need for development, doesn’t have any decorations. Of course I could have implemented client-side decorations for it. But as my readers might know, I consider client-side decorations as an inferior solution. And KWin of course has support for server-side decorations anyway for X11 and thus it’s less work to go for server-side decoration than to go for client-side.

The second reason is that Qt’s default client-side decorations are comparable ugly and lack important features like a difference between active and inactive windows which makes using a Wayland session really hard.

In this case a possibility could have been to develop a plugin so that KDecoration based themes could be used for client-side decoration. But to get it really useable this would have required a complex protocol to get in on par with what KWin internally has.

So here’s the solution:



A core element is a protocol to negotiate whether a window should have server-, client-side or no decoration which got added to KWayland. KWin got an implementation for that both as server and client. I plan to submit the protocol for inclusion in Wayland next year. I do think that this can be a general solution: KWin won’t stay the only Wayland compositor preferring to not have client-side decorations. If we think about tiling and use cases like phones we see that client-side cannot be the ultimate solution. Thus I think it’s a useful extension. Of course it doesn’t forbid client-side decoration, that’s still possible with the protocol. So GTK+ applications build upon client-side decoration are still able to use it, but of course I highly recommend to use server-side decorations on a system that prefers server-side decorations (the protocol is also able to tell that).

The last part to get this working got implemented in our Qt Platform Theme plugin for Plasma. This plugin will move from frameworksintegration to Plasma with 5.6, so we can easily extend it and depend on KWayland. The plugin checks whether the server supports the protocol and if it does it disables Qt’s client side decorations. For each new created Wayland window it tells KWin to either use server-side decoration or no decoration (popup windows). As all of that is implemented in our platform theme plugin it means that it doesn’t affect other Wayland compositors. There the plugin does not get loaded and Qt’s client-side decorations will be used. So no fear: this won’t affect GNOME Shell at all. As the plugin is currently in the process of being moved, it’s only in a scratch repository and won’t make it to main this year. Our code deserves a Christmas break as well 🙂

Happy holidays and a successful Wayland year 2016!