KWin 5 To Drop Its OpenGL 1.x Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KWin 5 To Drop Its OpenGL 1.x Compositor

KDE's KWin compositor will be dropping its legacy OpenGL 1 compositor with the upcoming KWin 5 Alpha release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYyNjE

[BlackStar]

Phoronix: KWin 5 To Drop Its OpenGL 1.x Compositor

KDE's KWin compositor will be dropping its legacy OpenGL 1 compositor with the upcoming KWin 5 Alpha release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYyNjE

In before Honton turns this into a sign of KDE's demise. /s

[pingufunkybeat]

Yet another feature drop by KDE!

Which feature exactly was dropped, funky? Please be specific, because the rest of us do not see any features being dropped. KWin5 will work exactly the same way it did before.

Either that, or apologise for your nonsensical trolling, and admit that you were wrong, again.

[zanny]

I hope the other desktops start taking a stance along the lines of "you need some kind of opengl / gles 2+ device available for GUIs". There are millions of lines of code to work around dealing with software rendering, and then we came along and got llvmpipe - in practice, it is much easier to tune feature utilization to the performance potential of the host system than to rewrite entire render engines to support openGL vs Xrender vs software.

I mean, what modern computer since 2006 won't have a graphics accelerator capable of opengl 2? And even on low power systems without any acceleration (proprietary Android gpus, mostly) llvmpipe even on 1.5ghz arm cores can run a minimal "accelerated" desktop just fine. And I'm hesitant to tell anyone to try putting a graphical Linux environment on anything without acceleration in the first place - you want to give someone bad first impressions, missing critical modern hardware is a biggie. I'd expect people to understand "this is an Android GPU, it doesn't support Linux, so you need a device that does" more than "well, your desktop has absurd artifacts, segfaults, breakage, kernel panics etc - because you are using software translation for opengl and that probably isn't a pleasant experience.

[schmidtbag]

I hope the other desktops start taking a stance along the lines of "you need some kind of opengl / gles 2+ device available for GUIs". There are millions of lines of code to work around dealing with software rendering, and then we came along and got llvmpipe - in practice, it is much easier to tune feature utilization to the performance potential of the host system than to rewrite entire render engines to support openGL vs Xrender vs software.

I mean, what modern computer since 2006 won't have a graphics accelerator capable of opengl 2? And even on low power systems without any acceleration (proprietary Android gpus, mostly) llvmpipe even on 1.5ghz arm cores can run a minimal "accelerated" desktop just fine.

I agree - and dropping openGL 1.x will only help the development of KDE. Besides, even if a system only supported openGL 1.x, GPU accelerated compositing should be the lowest of your priorities in terms of performance and usability. On a system that old, you can't realistically run anything more demanding than XFCE's "compositing". I'm a little wary of how heavy linux has been getting in the past couple years, but on the other hand, most changes to the kernel or desktop environments don't really benefit people with old hardware anyway.

Considering how cheap and efficient hardware is getting, anything before the Core2/Athlon II days isn't worth keeping. Same goes for anything older than the HD2000 series or geforce 8000 series. Sure some hardware older than those are perfectly capable of doing modern everyday tasks, but the physical size, power consumption, and heat generated proportionate to the performance they offer is hard to justify. $80 ARM systems are better than $800 PCs from 10 years ago, and under full load use less power than just a micro ATX motherboard by itself.

[DebianLinuxero]

Umm, I think first and second generation Intel Atom's Netbook and Nettop's would be affected by this.

Weren't GMA 945 and 950 OpenGL 1.4 only?

Too bad if that's the case.

[panda84]

Umm, I think first and second generation Intel Atom's Netbook and Nettop's would be affected by this.

Weren't GMA 945 and 950 OpenGL 1.4 only?

Too bad if that's the case.

Even the older i915 has some form of 2.1 support:

OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 915GM
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 9.2.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

I don't think the hardware is fully capable of OpenGL 2.x, I think some extensions fallback to software, but overall I think most of the things a Compositor need are supported.

[Daktyl198]

Not if you planned to use the now dead OpenGL 1 compositor. See that feature were killed off leaving old users out in the cold. That might be the right thing to do but it is still a FACT that KDE killed another feature and alienated users. Don't try to deny facts. KDE is killing features.

Let's ignore the irony that this is coming from a Gnome supporter for a moment to actually refer to the article. Martin explained that since they've switched to using QtQuick2 for many things, there is an almost hard dependency on OpenGL2.x comparable hardware. Thus, the only reason to use the OGL1 renderer was if you wanted to, and I doubt people were doing that.

Also, "alienating users" is kind of strong wording considering it looks like everybody agrees with the choice (*cough*unlike Gnome*cough*)

You gotta step up your game, Honton. It's just becoming boring now. Try giving us some decent trolling next time

[Andrecorreia]

opengl 2.1

Even the older i915 has some form of 2.1 support:


I don't think the hardware is fully capable of OpenGL 2.x, I think some extensions fallback to software, but overall I think most of the things a Compositor need are supported.

opengl 2.1 in this atom not work, even if drivers says that. for a good working 3d working with this atom we cant enable opengl 2.1. i have one and i have problems with rendering unity, gnome3 and cinnamon with opengl 2.1 enable i dont known about kde

[schmidtbag]

Not if you planned to use the now dead OpenGL 1 compositor. See that feature were killed off leaving old users out in the cold. That might be the right thing to do but it is still a FACT that KDE killed another feature and alienated users. Don't try to deny facts. KDE is killing features.

As stated before, even if they kept openGL 1.x, old users probably couldn't get decent performance out of compositing anyway. As someone else pointed, there's always LLVM, and as the article pointed out, there's X render, so no, nobody is being "left in the cold". I'd like to know how many KDE 4 users there are that still use ogl 1.x compositing. This isn't even a "feature" being removed, it's just simply a layer of compatibility that is highly unnecessary, and it might be alienating less than 1% of all linux users. I'd much rather have the limited developer resources and time focused on openGL 2.x and 3.x, where people will actually USE it. Remember, every additional thing added is 1 more thing to maintain.

On another note, even if KDE lost 10 nice-to-have features, it'd still be more feature-rich than any other DE. I really don't understand why people like you try so hard to go out of you way to hate a piece of software that you don't even have to use.