KDE's KWin Now Considers Its X11 Code To Be Under An "Eternal Feature Freeze"

[mastermind]

The comment section over there is rather interesting:

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/kwinx11-is-feature-frozen/comment-page-1/#comment-75419

Stumbled upon Nvidia’s side of the story today:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1026340/linux/black-or-incorrect-textures-in-kde/post/5222261/#5222261

“As far as we are aware, KWin isn’t being tested by its developers on NVIDIA hardware, despite our offers to provide hardware for free. ”
So, what’s the problem with taking their free hardware and reproducing reported bugs?

I decided years ago to not take hardware.

I’m curious… why? If you don’t like the proprietary drivers, you could at least test on Nouveau.

There are multiple reasons. In the past I used to have several cards with the idea of switching them out and testing on every of them. In practice I never did. The effort to get out the screwdriver, install the card, switch drivers were so high, that I never did it. Then I also realized it’s totally pointless if I would do so. There are too many cards, it’s not just the three vendors, they have different hardware generations, different driver generations. The matrix gets easily to 60 different cards, in the case of Intel it would mean different mainboards or complete systems. That makes it an unreasonable task to try to test it. Yes, it needs to be tested, but it cannot be tested by one developer in his spare time. That’s a full time job. So if I would do that, I would not be able to do anything else.

So I decided to not accept any hardware as it’s pointless. With regards of NVIDIA the situation is also that I run Wayland. Accepting an NVIDIA card to test with the proprietary driver is absolutely useless for me. NVIDIA doesn’t support gbm, I cannot use it. And no, I’m not going back to X11 to test NVIDIA. I do my X11 testing on my notebook and it’s rather difficult to install a graphics card into a notebook ;-). My desktop system is Wayland only for – it feels like ages. I don’t even know how to start my development setup into X11 anymore and I’m not joking about that.

Also I don’t want to be in any kind of debt to any vendor. Look at the comments here, now imagine I would have accepted hardware donation and not fixed NVIDIA specific bugs? See the anger here by the commenters. No, I don’t want to be exposed to that.

I decide what I do in my spare time. I don’t want to do any driver testing, be it Intel, AMD or NVIDIA. No, I don’t want any hardware.

The KDE community is larger than me. Just because I don’t do it and I don’t accept hardware donations doesn’t mean other KDE devs won’t do it.

[Vistaus]

All the work for Wayland improved Kwin on X11 as well, there would be no reason to complain.

I was talking about this move, about not adding new features to Kwin on X11 anymore.

[molecule-eye]

Now Firefox and Wine should catch up.

Don't forget thunderbird, dropbox, Telegram, libreoffice, and the list goes on...

[R41N3R]

Telegram and LibreOffice do work on Plasma Wayland natively, at least the Arch Linux packages do. I know standard telegram had issues, so probably it is solved by packaging. LibreOffice does work as there is now xdg shell V6 support in kwin.