Wow, what a week! It’s just great to be at Desktop Summit again and meeting all those KDE people again and also the GNOME people which gives the event a different and pleasant touch.

The big topic for me at this Desktop Summit is to lay out the foundations for bringing the KDE Plasma Workspaces from the X11 Windowing System to the upcoming Wayland windowing system. This is an effort which will most likely take years, nevertheless I am hoping that we find enough interested developers to have something ready as a developer preview in our next release. The complete plan has been outlined in my presentation here at Desktop Summit. It seems like my slides and video recordings are not yet uploaded, but I put my slides in our wiki . If you can read German you can also have a look at my article in the current issue of freiesMagazin , where I wrote down what I talked about.

As there was some media coverage about my talk and also about other changes in KDE which are completely unrelated I just want to point out that the work going on for KDE Frameworks 5 does not influence our development of the desktop at all. This means we will continue to release further 4.x releases of the KDE Plasma Workspaces. Also given the changes which are going to happen in KDE Frameworks it will not be disruptive to the desktop. This means that there is no reason to use a “5.0” release to switch the windowing system from X11 to Wayland. We will switch when we are confident that we do not break the users’ desktops.

I also read some concerns about that we would remove the X11 Network Transparency. Relax: we don’t want to break our users’ desktops. Just have a look at this architecture:

As you can see even with Wayland as the windowing system we will continue to support remote X Clients.

Yesterday we had a BoF about the changes needed for Plasma. We did unfortunately not agree on that much, but I will put up a wiki page with small TODOs, so that others can work on it. The BoF turned out into a discussion about Client Side Windowdecorations, which I did not want to spend time on. But in the end I think it was useful as now developers from other projects understand our position better and can understand why we will stick to server side decorations even with Wayland. I will soon write down a policy to exactly specify when windows will be decorated and when not and implement it for 4.8 (should only require minor changes).

On a completely unrelated note: thanks to the decision of three persons, I will be going to Akademy 2012. Thanks very much for the award.

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