14 DAY TRIAL // Wayland, the next-generation display server for Linux-based operating systems is on its way to becoming ready for everyday use, and the KDE Neon development team took a step further with their KDE Plasma Wayland implementation.
Instead of providing those Plasma Wayland ISO images for those who wanted to test drive Wayland on the latest KDE Neon builds, they installed the Wayland session by default on the KDE Neon Developer Unstable ISOs, though, to try it, you'll have to log out, select the Wayland session from the login screen, and log back in.
On the other hand, if you're downloading the latest KDE Neon Developer Unstable ISO images and install them on a new computer to test Wayland, you’ll have to relay on the X11 session because the Calamares does not run in Wayland as it needs root. Once KDE Neon is installed, make sure you select the Wayland session at login.
"With Wayland becoming closer to be ready to use every day I’ve decided it’s time to scrap the dedicated Wayland ISOs and just install the Wayland session by default on the Dev Unstable ISOs," said one of the devs. "It’s not yet the default so to give it a try you need to log out, select Wayland session and log in again."
Wayland is pretty much ready for everyday use
According to the KDE Neon maintainers, the Wayland display server is pretty much ready for everyday use, and it could soon replace the old X.Org Server display server that's vulnerable and buggy. But it won't become the default for their GNU/Linux distribution until it works out-of-the-box will all GPUs on the market.
To make Wayland default session for KDE Neon right now it would mean that there's need for a complex script to detect those obscure graphics cards that are not yet supported by Wayland and automatically fallback to X11, but it's hard to implement something like this.
But the good news remains that Wayland is gaining pace and could soon be on par with X.Org Server. KDE Neon is currently based on Ubuntu, and it looks like Canonical is working on implementing a testing infrastructure for test driving Wayland on Intel, AMD and Nvidia computers for Ubuntu 17.10.
