Desktop

This story consists of the notes I’m taking as I study and learn how KDE Plasma works. Every time I go over it and edit and polish it, I learn more about Linux and the story improves.

Read the manual. Do your research. Investigate and learn how Linux works. Right now, I’m reading The Z Shell Manual. At first it was incomprehensible. Its like reading a dictionary. Once you get into it, go back and read those first few sections again. They will make a lot more sense.

Read the whole story, all the way through, as fast as you can. Don’t try to remember all the details. Just read as fast as you can to get finished. Get those ideas and patterns imprinted in your long term memory. You’ll solidify them by using Linux. Work on understanding how Linux works.

Linux is in the process of transition from an old, modular architecture, to a new, more efficient system based on systemd and Wayland. Investigate how the kernel, the file system, systemd and Wayland all work together to produce what you see on the screen. sysVinit and X11 is the old way. systemd and Wayland is the new way.

We have to make the transition gradually, to bring everyone along. So now, Linux is in a confusing, often changing, status of gradually building up the new system, at the same time gradually deprecating the old system. There are a lot of valuable old computers, with the old system, so we can’t just change everything suddenly. Writing the code for the new systems is also a complex problem that must be done carefully.

X11

The X server is the old program or dedicated terminal that displays the windows and handles input devices such as keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. The clients are applications.

X11 and Kwin are the old system. Wayland, with the Weston compositor, is the new window manager and compositor all rolled into one. Learn how they work and enjoy creating wonderful works of art.

Kwin

Kwin is the KDE Plasma 5 compositor for X11. It will run just fine with Wayland. Kwin is a very well developed compositor that the KDE community does not want to give up just yet. At this point, Weston is a new, relatively lightweight, compositor built into the Wayland window manager.

Kwin enables you to customize the windows on your computer’s desktop. You can right click on a window decoration or open system settings to use Kwin’s new, easier to use, configuration panel. You can switch between windows by holding your alt button down while you tab through the windows that are open on your desktop.

Wayland

Wayland is a simpler, easier to develop and maintain, replacement for the X Window System. It is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.

The compositor can be a stand-alone display server, an X application, or a Wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.

The Weston reference implementation of a Wayland compositor is part of the Wayland project. Weston can run as an X client or under Linux KMS. The Weston compositor is a minimal and fast compositor, suitable for many embedded and mobile applications.

KMS, Kernel Mode Setting, involves making changes in the kernel to change the appearance of your desktop? Wayland combines the compositor and the window server into one lightweight component. It allows clients (applications) to make most changes on your desktop and uses KMS for deeper changes.

XWM is the X Windows Manager. It is part of the Wayland server. Xwayland is a client that runs legacy X11 applications on top of Wayland. The Wayland compositor’s Window Manager (WWM) can manage all windows by using XWM as a bridge between the Wayland server and Xwayland clients.

Normally, Wayland only spawns one Xwayland server and all X11 clients use that one server. So, the X11 clients are not protected or isolated from each other. The Wayland compositor can override this default behavior by spawning application specific instances of Xwayland. Wayland clients are naturally isolated from X11 clients.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/

System Settings

Access your system settings by clicking on your Application Menu>System Settings. I usually select my system settings as one of my favorite applications, if it isn’t already selected by default.

The first application I install on a new Linux installation is Kcolorchooser. Use it to help you set all your applications up with the same color scheme.

Start out with appearance and select a color scheme and edit the color scheme to get your desktop to be a work of art created by you. Select Hardware>Power Management and set your power management to adjust the idle time before your computer screen turns off.

Select input devices to adjust your mouse pad, so that you can scroll your display with one finger along the one edge of your mouse pad. You can also set numlock on at start up. Look around in your system settings and adjust your system the way you like it.

Sources

• https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/