14 DAY TRIAL // A few moments ago, December 18, KDE developer and ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first ever Live ISO image with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment running on top of the next-generation Wayland display server.
If you've ever dreamed of having a Live image that you can download, write on a USB flash drive and test out the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment on Wayland, today is your lucky day, as it would appear that the KDE developers have prepared a special Christmas gift just for you, the Linux user out there in love with the latest KDE/Wayland technologies.
"The Plasma team has been working on an early Christmas present: a live image running Plasma on Wayland," said Jonathan Riddell. "Being able to run a full session of Plasma with applications is a major milestone in our aim of moving from the 30 year old X Window System to its replacement. [...] Congratulations to Martin Gräßlin and the rest of the Plasma team on making this possible."
KWin is the central component
In the release announcement, Mr. Riddell explains that the KDE devs had to implement some powerful functionality into KDE's KWin window manager, which appears to be the central component for making KDE Plasma run well on the Wayland display server. Therefore, KWin is now fully capable of running the compositor and support the Wayland protocols, but it will take years of work to make it production-ready.
This is the first release of the KDE Plasma 5 Wayland Live image, so some graphical glitches are to be expected at this time. Consider this as a demo of what's to come in the porting of the KDE Plasma desktop environment to the Wayland display server. You can download the ISO image right now, which you must write on a USB stick using the dd command. Please note that it won't work on a virtual machine!