KDE's KWin To Still Pursue X11 Composite Unredirect, More Wayland Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE's KWin To Still Pursue X11 Composite Unredirect, More Wayland Improvements

KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KWin-2019-XDC

[skeevy420]

I read the slides but didn't see any mention of tildearrow's low-latency fork. I'm hoping that's what the last bullet-point is for.

[grigi]

I stopped using the low latency fork, it caused random crashes for me, and sometime stuttering. I also could not actually "feel" a difference.

[skeevy420]

Perhaps that was a matter of a difference to our used settings, what GPU we have, or when/how we compiled it -- Compile it at the wrong time and it will behave badly due to it being slightly behind or slightly ahead of what's available in the repositories; sometimes I have to build it a version behind while waiting on Manjaro to play catch-up.

All I know is that I've been having a great desktop experience with kwin-lowlatency and I haven't been able attribute any crashes or issues to it since I've been using it.

[andyprough]

Recently I've been running the marco window manager from mate on the Trinity Desktop. Much better overall effects and responsiveness than kwin. $ marco --replace

I like marco's motto: "Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops, Marco is like Cheerios."

[shmerl]

Looking forward to KWin/Wayland using WSI/Vulkan renderer, and supporting adaptive sync. Right now it's too tied to EGL/OpenGL.

[khnazile]

On the X11 front, they still plan to support composite unredirect as well as blocking and other improvements

Oh, now they want unredirect back. What happened? Is something happend to X11 that made supporting unredirect easier for KWin? Because back then they removed it last time, they claimed it was an unsupportable pile of junk, and that anyone who against it is just a secret hater of KDE.

[romangg]

Correction: composite unredirect is not something we pursue. One feature that I will assess in the future instead is making use of auto-list compositing in KWin. But this needs some more work in XServer first.

Sorry for not being clear about that in the slides provided.

[aufkrawall]

Oh, now they want unredirect back. What happened? Is something happend to X11 that made supporting unredirect easier for KWin? Because back then they removed it last time, they claimed it was an unsupportable pile of junk, and that anyone who against it is just a secret hater of KDE.

Their are now three KWin maintainers, who apparently approach such questions in a more pragmatic manner than the old maintainer. A very welcome development.

[tildearrow]

Correction: composite unredirect is not something we pursue. One feature that I will assess in the future instead is making use of auto-list compositing in KWin. But this needs some more work in XServer first.

Sorry for not being clear about that in the slides provided.

Wait, what?

What is so wrong with unredirection anyway?