 Hi everyone, we're back with another retrospective and today with me is the Wayland KD Goals champion. Hi, can you introduce yourself and say a little bit about yourself? Hi, yes, I'm Mehran, I live in France and I've been KDA users for years and years and since 2019 I've been involved in contribution. At the beginning it was with the goal of usability and productivity that was led by Netgram back then and since then my involvement has been increasing and yeah. And now you're the champion for Wayland, correct? Yes and since 2019 and the Milan Academy I've been the Wayland champion, goal champion. Excellent and can you just give a quick summary of what Wayland is about? Simply put it's a replacement for Xorg, so Xorg is the thing that organizes your windows and handle your screen and let applications be displayed on the screen and Wayland is a new implementation of that kind of software. So it's a huge replacement and there are a lot of reasons that are very important. Well for end users the important parts are that Wayland is modern compared to Xorg so it brings a lot of improvements in particular. Some of the reasons are rendering. Wayland is way better at rendering good images. For instance on my own laptop I have sometimes some cheering way playing some video on X11 and it won't happen on Wayland for instance and there are security improvements, there are performance improvements with performance you have better battery life as well and a lot of better devices support embedded devices so it's easier to handle tablets and so on. So it's wide ranging. Okay thanks and is it something that just the KDE community cares about or is it a wider transformation? Yes that's a good question that's a very wider transition. In fact it has been started more than 10 years ago already by X11 developers that with their experience thought that it was needed to go somewhere else technically so they designed a new architecture for how to organize the screen and how applications can display on screens basically and from then on it just grew slowly and steadily so in KDE and in Plasma we care about Wayland but other free software environment also are switching to them or our devices like like GameScope is using Wayland renderer for instance Wayland architecture and so and and then since it's about applications as well applications also have to care about it at least to some extent if they use a common framework they don't have to pay much attention to it but a lot of applications need more than just what the framework offers and for those cases you may need to have adaptations also. You mentioned that GameScope uses Wayland but that's not a KDE project right? I think that's running on the Steam Deck right? Exactly. Gaming applications and whatever KDE application is are the desktop or mobile so it's in many places I guess. Yeah so original like like it's very used in embedded devices because compared to X11 it's lighter weight so you can put a Wayland display server on smaller devices with less resources basically so so in cars for instance that's the kind of things that you would want to use rather than X11 and since you don't have you don't need many features of Wayland on those kind of devices that's really common edge case in the industry currently. You mentioned that it's a bigger transformation that is industry wide so to speak and maybe it's already has been happening for a while can you can you tell us how it looked like when the goal began the couple years back and how it looks now so what was the change basically for Wayland support? Well from from my perspective from my point of view as a user as a user I remember that back then the multi-screen wasn't really working that you didn't have primary selections that's a middle quick basting you couldn't do screen capture you couldn't do video capture there were stability issues you would be in console and you would click on a link it wouldn't bring up firefox like then and that's all the other things that are taught then there are fixed now so you can have video capture you have better video activations and so on and that's just the top of my mind that's from the top of my mind yeah that all sounds great so would you say that did the goal achieve its purpose? Yeah I'd say yes but there are some caveas the goal well there was already a Wayland effort within the KDE community and the goal just reinforced it and brought some light to it to this effort so it brought some more people in interest to it and now we are reaching a point where Plasma Wayland is reaching better quality I'd say so most of the features are here most of this it is mostly stable but it's not but it won't fit a hundred percent of users use cases so the goal was really overarching over reaching and that's the purpose of goals to reach for very high yeah reach for the stars so the goal accelerated the work on Wayland and put the focus on Wayland so even if it's not ready yet it's probably in a better place now than if it weren't selected as the goal would you agree with that? I would argue that it's ready for a wide range of users like for users that care more that have a laptop and that for a single screen they want to have practitioner scaling for instance you would have you will have a better experience in Wayland and there are a bunch of cases like this where Wayland will just provide a better experience to users already as long as you don't need some applications that have really poor compatibility as long as you don't have edge cases well our configuration that is not as supported currently with Wayland you'll be you'll be fine okay that's good and for those users that don't yet have the setup that is currently 100% working in Wayland what can they do? I know the community is active on Twitter on Reddit on other social media on our metrics channels how can they help with either submitting bugs or the use cases that don't work yet how was the best approach for those users yeah bringing up bringing up their concern their issues is a great way to is a good thing to do because it helps developers focus so we don't lose the ball that in the end it's our users we want to please and that's valuable also we might have information about how to work around your issues so it's or other users might might as well so talking about it on on Reddit is great reporting bug is great as well but it requires a bit more effort you are very active I would say on on KDE's Reddit looking for people talking about their Wayland use cases issues etc is that a helpful way to go directly to the to the user say I'd say yes because like you can really feel real frustrations because many users will talk about the same subjects because threads will become very popular about some subjects so you can really see what what users are expecting or where are they focus and so you can try to match your your work as a developer like my or raise the attention of other developers as well and and sometimes also on Reddit you don't have just and sometimes you have also users that think developers and it's great that for developers to get motivation and so that's another reason why why it's great to get involved and and on Reddit and and and be part of the community that that talks that that exchange an active member right exactly yeah since this series is a bit of a retrospective about the goal is there anything looking back that you would say you'd do differently as a gold champion to to help with the goal yeah the the the goals that can be we over achieving so what the most important things you need to find is when you are involved well when you are involved in a goal is to find people motivated and so you all I wish I had done a better job trying to reach more users or contributors and to achieve that see there is the main way is to communicate is to write blog posts and encourage and and expand things and and write documentation and and so on and that's or that's something I wish I'd done more of and and that another thing that I wish I'd done better is to manage things I mean try to be a project manager that is keep the keep a list of things that you want to focus on and try to prioritize things that you know needed to be worked on that's the on the on our wiki for instance we have the well on showstopper page and and that's a good tool for instance there needs to be maintained and and and and try to get your goal members to to participate in that for instance in in the uh qt6 sporting uh qt6 sporting you thought there are there is a good organization there and that's something to emulate on your goal yeah those are good I think ideas in general for anyone who thinks about becoming the next gold champion as the process will start soon do you have any other general tips for for those people that might become the next champion well you can prepare yourself to invest some time and and but still you you can remember that that's not a single person effort that's really important to see yourself as part of the community and and and find the and find the people to work with on your goal and that's the most important tip I could say okay great and lastly what are your plans for yourself after we have new goals and and the wayland goal will go you know out of focus well I plan to still stay active on the well on issues and on my other contributions and we'll see what the the new girls are and whether I can be of help to them and because I've I've done that it done that in the past and I'll be very happy to participate in in someone else effort or I'm not being a champion but rather a participant and and that's my plan about my activity okay great and I'm sure the community will be happy for for you continuing working on on wayland and and other related issues so thank you for that and thank you for being our champion for the last couple of years and thank you very much for the interview you're welcome bye bye