KDE retro post

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+layout: post
+title: Sway reporting in from KDE's Berlin development sprint
+---
+
+I'm writing to you from an airplane on my way back to Philadelphia, after
+spending a week in Berlin working with the KDE team. It was great to meet those
+folks and work with them for a while. It'll take me some time to get the taste
+of C++ out of my mouth, though! In all seriousness, it was a very productive
+week and I feel like we have learned a lot about each other's projects and have
+a strengthened interest in collaborating more in the future.
+
+The main purpose of my trip was to find opportunities for
+[sway](http://swaywm.org) and [KDE](http://kde.org) to work together on
+improving the Linux desktop. Naturally, the main topic of discussion was
+interopability of software written for each of our projects. I brought the
+wlroots layer-shell protocol to the table seeking their feedback on it, as well
+as reviewing how their desktop shell works today. From our discussions we found
+a lot of common ground in our designs and needs, as well as room for improvement
+in both of our approaches.
+
+The KDE approach to their desktop shell is similar to the original sway
+approach. Today, their Plasma shell uses a number of proprietary protocols which
+are hacks on top of the xdg-shell protocol (for those not in the know, the
+xdg-shell protocol is used to render normal desktop windows and is not designed
+for use with shell surfaces) that incorporate several of the concepts they were
+comfortable using on X11 in an almost 1:1 fashion. Sway never had any X11
+concepts to get comfortable with, but some may not know that sway's panel,
+wallpaper, and lock screen programs on the 0.x releases are also hacks on top of
+xdg-shell that are not portable between compositors.
+
+In the wlroots project (which is overseen by sway), we've been developing a
+new protocol designed for desktop shell components like these. In theory, it is
+a more generally applicable approach to building desktop shells on Wayland than
+the approach we were using before. I sat down with the KDE folks and went over
+this protocol in great detail, and learned about how Plasma shell works today,
+and we were happy to discover that the wlroots approach (with some minor tweaks)
+should be excellently suited to Plasma shell. In addition to the layer-shell, we
+reviewed several other protocols Plasma uses to build its desktop experience,
+and identified more places where it makes sense for us to unify our approach.
+Other subjects discussed included virtual desktops, external window management,
+screen capture and pipewire, and more.
+
+The upshot of this is that we believe it's possible to integrate the Plasma
+shell with sway. Users of KDE on X11 were able to replace kwin with i3 and still
+utilize the Plasma shell - a feature which was lost in the transition to
+Wayland. As we continue to work together, this use-case may well be captured
+again. Even KDE users who are uninterested in sway stand to benefit from this.
+The hacks Plasma uses today are temporary and unmaintainable, and the
+improvements to Plasma's codebase will make it easier to work with. Should kwin
+grow stable layer-shell support, clients designed for sway will work on KDE as
+well. Replacing sway's own similar hacks will have similar benefits for our
+codebase and open the door to 3rd-party panels, lockscreens, rofi, etc.
+
+I spent my time in their care working on actual code to this end. I wrote up a
+C++ library that extends Qt with layer-shell support called
+[qtlayershell](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/qtlayershell), and extended the
+popular [Latte Dock](#) KDE extension to support it. Though this work is not
+complete, it works - as I write this blog post, Latte is running on my sway
+session! This is good progress, but I must return my focus to wlroots soon. If
+you are interested in this work, please help me complete it!
+
+![](/img/latte-dock.png)
+
+A big thanks goes to KDE for putting on this event and covering my travel costs
+to attend. I hope they found it as productive as I did, and I'm very excited
+about working more with them in the future. The future of Wayland is bright!
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