When running KDE, the X11 compatibility layer for Wayland, XWayland, always runs, even if there isn’t anything on the system still requiring the legacy X server to work. In the next step towards a Wayland-only world, the KDE people have reached a major milestone: XWayland now only runs when actually needed.
This week a significant technical milestone was achieved: the XWayland compatibility layer is now loaded only when needed. Previously it had always been running even when no apps were using it, and fixing this required porting various system services away from legacy X11 code paths. This work was done by Vlad Zahorodnii, David Edmundson, and David Redondo, and will ship in Plasma 6.9.
↫ Nate Graham
This frees up some system resources, which is always a welcome improvement. I do wonder how this might impact the load times of legacy X applications, but I have a feeling it’s close to immeasurable.
