KDE Sees New Features, Bug Fixes Ahead Of Christmas

[user1]

It would be great seeing some of the KwinFT improvements integrated into KDE upstream. I am very pleased with it already, even in its current state.

In your experience, what is better in KwinFT compared to vanilla Kwin? I know that vanilla Kwin on x11 suffers from stuttering which is what Kwin-lowlatency fixes. I've also tried Plasma wayland session recently and it seems that Kwin-wayland doesn't have the stuttering issue.

[Vistaus]

"With KDE Frameworks 5.78, all KDE software now supports AVIF (AV1) images when libavif is present."

Wow, this is really cool. That all software can get support for more file formats when a library is installed without that software has to do anything. So you just install a image library and all image software now can handle that file, you install a audio format and all your media players can now handle that format, that's really cool.

It is, but not exactly innovative or anything. AmigaOS supported that many years ago and current AmigaOS releases still do. So it's actually an old feature that is just now starting to find traction within KDE.

[Anarchy]

Does anyone know if scaling per monitor is also for x11 or is this just a wayland improvement? There is also the font scaling, btw, is this also part of the improvement?

[Vistaus]

When a codebase gets forked, it inevitably drifts out of alignment with the parent codebase

So? Isn't that the whole point of FOSS? Not just that anyone can fork something and release their own spin, but also that anyone can fork something and merge it back, even if the codebase is out of alignment.

[ngraham]

So? Isn't that the whole point of FOSS? Not just that anyone can fork something and release their own spin, but also that anyone can fork something and merge it back, even if the codebase is out of alignment.

Sure. but there's a difference between "fork for the purpose of developing features for the parent" and "fork for the purpose of trying to replace the parent or developing the software in a different way". In the latter cases, merging back to the parent becomes more difficult the longer the fork is worked on.

To be clear, I'd be happy if Roman opts to contribute any of his applicable work back to KWin.

[ngraham]

Does anyone know if scaling per monitor is also for x11 or is this just a wayland improvement? There is also the font scaling, btw, is this also part of the improvement?

It is already in Wayland, and unfortunately it's highly doubtful that we will be able to implement it for X11 too.

[Anarchy]

It is already in Wayland, and unfortunately it's highly doubtful that we will be able to implement it for X11 too.

That is really unfortunate, this would have been an excellent addition to x11.

[Awesomeness]

That would be a question for its developer.

Well, you guys could apologize for ganging up on him and chasing him away. There were literally no reasons to refuse the Sway compatibility patches on KScreen.

[ms178]

In your experience, what is better in KwinFT compared to vanilla Kwin? I know that vanilla Kwin on x11 suffers from stuttering which is what Kwin-lowlatency fixes. I've also tried Plasma wayland session recently and it seems that Kwin-wayland doesn't have the stuttering issue.

I am still on X11 and can give you anecdotal evidence only there: With my 144 Hz monitor, custom compiled kernel and everything else (mesa, libdrm, llvm and kwinft) trimmed for low-latency (compiled with optimized flags), KwinFT provides a smoother experience than stock KWin which is still acceptable but stuttery and laggy in comparison. Youtube and web browsing are opening nearly instantly and are butter smooth, but I am probably more sensitive to latency than normal users. Kwin low-latency is also a noticeable improvement which I can highly recommend over stock KWin.

By the way, the desktop experience is between day and night comparing stock Manjaro with my optimized build. Even when benchmarking Company of Heroes 2 (Proton), I get a huge improvement of 17 fps (50 vs 67 fps, a couple of weeks ago I've seen 72 fps, there were some performance regressions during the last eight weeks). Granted, I would get similar FPS on Kubuntu with the Xanmod Kernel or with a LTO'ed Kernel on openSUSE Tumbleweed with much less work, but the desktop experience would be a bit worse still and I am doing it for fun to learn a thing about compilers. I wonder why there is not a bigger push for performance from the distro vendors, especially for the desktop/gaming use case. My own experiences show me that there is still a lot of room for improvements and we haven't even tapped into LTO+PGO yet.

[timofonic]

Well, you guys could apologize for ganging up on him and chasing him away. There were literally no reasons to refuse the Sway compatibility patches on KScreen.

I agree.

I consider KDE front must be more open to collaboration.