Tag Archives: Robert Ancell

Linux

Re-post: David Edmundson KDE, LightDM and the Mir Kerfuffle

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KDE Project: 

A re-post of David Edmundson's blog KDE, LightDM and the Mir Kerfuffle for Planet Ubuntu

With Canonical’s decision to make a new display server, there’s been some questions as to how this affects LightDM and the KDE front end I’ve spent a long time working towards.
It’s a perfectly sensible question, LightDM has heavy Canonical sponsorship, and a display server needs to be supported in the display manager.
Canonical (and Ubuntu) have decided not to adopt Wayland as their new display server, but a new in-house system called Mir. We in KDE have already made the decision that Wayland is the future, and work in kwin has already begun on that. Having a Display Manager that supports a Wayland system compositor is essential to our long term strategy.
I’ve been asked to address this a lot, so I’ll put my thoughts in a blog post.
The back story
After a bad experience customising KDM for a really important and scary client I wanted to redo the UI and customisation experience of KDM.
I wanted to rewrite the whole UI and config side, so started looking through KDM code. It was around this time Robert Ancell posted about LightDM, a new display manager that aimed to be greeter agnostic. This was around 2 years ago when everyone was getting excited over Wayland, it was clear it was in LightDMs roadmap.
This seemed like a win, win situation. I get an easier platform to write my new login manager on *and* I get to bring Wayland support to KDE.
I wrote Qt bindings around LightDM upstream, along with a reference QWidget based greeter. I then started working on the KDE greeter in our repository.
The KDE greeter is approaching version 0.4. It is included in many distros, and generally feedback has generally been very positive.
The current state
Whilst LightDM is made by Canonical it is community driven and all patches go through review where anyone can comment. I have an opportunity to argue if anything is greeter specific in the libraries.
LightDM is used by my KDE greeter (used in some distros, not all), XFCE, and Razor Qt and of course Unity.
The Qt library was originally only used by us and Razor Qt, but with Unity’s move to QML this means that Canonical are now dependant on the libraries I made. I am still in charge of the Qt library and still get final say on all reviews, I have rejected some Canonical employee patches as needing a rewrite and them with some of mine, it feels like a real open meritocracy community.
The rant
The golden-egg of using LightDM in KDE was that we wouldn’t have to support all the boring things we need to make a display manager work, we wouldn’t need to support a Wayland system compositor we get it for free. We all write stuff that helps each …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

KDE, LightDM and the Mir Kerfuffle

Leave a comment

With Canonical’s decision to make a new display server, there’s been some questions as to how this affects LightDM and the KDE front end I’ve spent a long time working towards.

It’s a perfectly sensible question, LightDM has heavy Canonical sponsorship, and a display server needs to be supported in the display manager.

Canonical (and Ubuntu) have decided not to adopt Wayland as their new display server, but a new in-house system called Mir. We in KDE have already made the decision that Wayland is the future, and work in kwin has already begun on that. Having a Display Manager that supports a Wayland system compositor is essential to our long term strategy.

I’ve been asked to address this a lot, so I’ll put my thoughts in a blog post.

The back story

After a bad experience customising KDM for a really important and scary client I wanted to redo the UI and customisation experience of KDM.

I wanted to rewrite the whole UI and config side, so started looking through KDM code. It was around this time Robert Ancell posted about LightDM, a new display manager that aimed to be greeter agnostic. This was around 2 years ago when everyone was getting excited over Wayland, it was clear it was in LightDMs roadmap.

This seemed like a win, win situation. I get an easier platform to write my new login manager on *and* I get to bring Wayland support to KDE.

I wrote Qt bindings around LightDM upstream, along with a reference QWidget based greeter. I then started working on the KDE greeter in our repository.

The KDE greeter is approaching version 0.4. It is included in many distros, and generally feedback has generally been very positive.

The current state

Whilst LightDM is made by Canonical it is community driven and all patches go through review where anyone can comment. I have an opportunity to argue if anything is greeter specific in the libraries.

LightDM is used by my KDE greeter (used in some distros, not all), XFCE, and Razor Qt and of course Unity.

The Qt library was originally only used by us and Razor Qt, but with Unity’s move to QML this means that Canonical are now dependant on the libraries I made. I am still in charge of the Qt library and still get final say on all reviews, I have rejected some Canonical employee patches as needing a rewrite and them with some of mine, it feels like a real open meritocracy community.

The rant

The golden-egg of using LightDM in KDE was that we wouldn’t have to support all the boring things we need to make a display manager work, we wouldn’t need to support a Wayland system compositor we get it for free. We all write stuff that helps each and open source progresses faster.

If I’d known they weren’t going to add Wayland support, I’m not sure I would have invested my time in LightDM. I don’t feel decieved, they thought they would do it at the time and Canonical are perfectly …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE