Recently I have seen many comments by users in the style of “I’m looking forward to the first release of KDE5 because of Wayland”. With every time there is such a comment the chances are that it spreads that the first release of “KDE5” will support Wayland and will result in disappointment when the first release of something ends up on the users’ systems. Thus I decided to write a blog post with clarifications.

As my readers probably know there won’t be a combined release as the software compilation used to be. There are independent ongoing projects around the libraries (frameworks or KF5) the workspaces (Plasma Next) and the applications. These projects have independent release cycles and are not one product. I know, I know, many people will disagree and say that it’s still one. But if we go for this strong simplification both “will support Wayland” and “will not support Wayland” are true.

And thus we enter the area where it is important to make the distinction between the various products and use the correct name. Otherwise people don’t know what you are talking about and it results in confusion.

So let’s look into the different areas. As I have already explained our libraries are getting prepared for Wayland and the first release of KF5 will have Wayland support not on par with X11 support but certainly on par with Microsoft Windows or OS X support.

This means for applications using our frameworks that they will support Wayland as long as they don’t speak X11 directly.

For the workspaces it’s more complex. Our aim for the first release of Plasma Next has never been to fully support Wayland or do the migration to Wayland. We obviously don’t want to create too many construction sides and decided to concentrate on getting everything ported to Qt 5 first before going to Wayland. As we are entering the alpha release state shortly we can be quite certain that the Plasma desktop shell will not support Wayland. Other parts of Plasma Next have a little bit more integration, some systemsettings modules get hidden when running on Wayland, some modules got fixed to not crash, KInfoCenter got some improvements to support the OpenGL module on Wayland and got a new Wayland module. KWin is still in the experimental support stage not yet being a Wayland compositor. Here we might still have some improvements till the final release as Wayland specific code is excluded from the feature freeze. But overall we can quite certainly say that the first release of Plasma Next will not support Wayland.