There's Experimental Work On A Vulkan Renderer For KDE's KWin

[schmidtbag]

It'd benefit nvidia users I think. There are some graphical issues that occur sometimes because nvidia non-free implements some opengl incorrectly according to kwin developer Martin.

If this is true then I would say that this is a worthy priority. After all, we can't really depend on Nvidia to fix something that everyone else gets right.

[grigi]

Its true. I have recently got a loan laptop with a nvidia chip in it. First I was running nouveau, and all was buttery smooth, but suspend/resume was broken. so I changed out to the binary driver, now suspend/resume works. but I had to disable some of the layers acceleration in Firefox to get rendering right. I also notice occasional glitches in rendering the cursor and sometime icons go weird as well. And compositing is super-jerky and not smooth at all.
Had to drop compositing from opengl to XRender to minimise graphical artefacts.

I'm super unimpressed after having having a radeonsi desktop.

[darkbasic]

This is awesome news! From my point of view this would allow Kwin a greater control about graphics, way too often something broke as of the drivers.

That's the point! Part of the responsability shifts to the kwin maintainer instead of the driver vendor (which mostly don't care/test for kwin).
The other point is lowering energy consumptions in mobile devices and laptops.

[tajjada]

There very well may be platforms in future where the Vulkan support is better than the OpenGL support or even where there is *only* Vulkan support. Those two situations make doing this worthwhile alone.

Another benefit is improved battery life due to less CPU usage and more efficient API. This would be nice on laptops.

[Vistaus]

Dunno, might be useful. Indeed, Intel GMA GPUs handle kwin animations / compositing beautifully, but it's not perfectly smooth and happens to be jerky with some other chips like NVIDIA ones (under GNOME too). Here Vulkan might make a difference ?

Wonder if this Vulkan renderer runs under an X context ?

My Intel card is pretty low-end (it's part of my Intel Celeron 7310), but KWin animations/compositing is very smooth. A little stutter every once in a while, but 9 out of 10 times it's as perfect as it should. And I do have quite a few effects enabled, so...

[FireBurn]

You can use VK_ICD_FILENAMES to override Vulkan driver priority.

It's supposed to be selectable via the app, but very few apps do this yet. I new about the ICD override. I guess I could set it in /etc/environment but it would be great if it could be thought about at the start when support was being written

[Vistaus]

The people behind the Nintendo Switch hack to launch Linux, now are able to run KDE with touchscreen controls:

https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/964954316892119040/video/1

Which is really cool! But no market for it as KDE isn't touch screen-oriented enough like GNOME Shell or Unity 8. At least, that's what people keep saying

[PackRat]

Which is really cool! But no market for it as KDE isn't touch screen-oriented enough like GNOME Shell or Unity 8. At least, that's what people keep saying

I have inherited two blackberrey playbooks and BB 10 phone that already use qt. Let me know if you guy's see a kde hack for these products.

[shmerl]

It's supposed to be selectable via the app, but very few apps do this yet. I new about the ICD override. I guess I could set it in /etc/environment but it would be great if it could be thought about at the start when support was being written

Since you need it on per application basis, just add the override to the starter script or desktop launcher.

[Vistaus]

I have inherited two blackberrey playbooks and BB 10 phone that already use qt. Let me know if you guy's see a kde hack for these products.

BB10 devices are too locked down for that. You can't install anything else because the bootloader can only boot images signed by BlackBerry. Same goes for the Playbook. BB10 doesn't use pure Qt though; it uses Cascades, which is a fork of Qt 4.

(I'm a BB Passport user since 2015, btw.)