KWinFT 5.21 Beta Pushes a "Monumental Rewrite" Of The Windowing Logic

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KWinFT 5.21 Beta Pushes a "Monumental Rewrite" Of The Windowing Logic

KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KWinFT-5.21-Beta

[HighValueWarrior]

As a user all I can say is Thanks for your hard work.
Greatly appreciated.

[ms178]

I am also amazed by his work and had quite some fun with 5.20 Beta already. I hope he can convince upstream KWin developers eventually to adopt his project as a replacement for KWin. In the meantime, it would be great if he can find some people who are willing to package and maintain KWinFT in user repos on all major distributions.

[Danny3]

Is this branch / fork kept in sync with one that KDE Plasma 5.21 is based on so that it could be easily merged back in one day ?
On a side note, I wish the developers could just add a native VNC-like server that works on both X11 and Wayland so we could easily control our desktops from laptops in the same house or from work or help friends and family over the internet.
There's the third party X11VNC server, that works with KDE, even though with terrible performance, bu I guess that would not work with a Wayland session which makes the whole Wayland session pointless.
Hopefully someone can add such a feature on one of these rewrites. Maybe it's possible also to have better performance.

[salvaju29ro]

Is this branch / fork kept in sync with one that KDE Plasma 5.21 is based on so that it could be easily merged back in one day ?
On a side note, I wish the developers could just add a native VNC-like server that works on both X11 and Wayland so we could easily control our desktops from laptops in the same house or from work or help friends and family over the internet.
There's the third party X11VNC server, that works with KDE, even though with terrible performance, bu I guess that would not work with a Wayland session which makes the whole Wayland session pointless.
Hopefully someone can add such a feature on one of these rewrites. Maybe it's possible also to have better performance.

I have read a few blog posts and on reddit and I think there is currently not much chance that they can merge the projects.

The KwinFT developer doesn't seem to get along very well with the Kde team (or something like that)

[shmerl]

This is great! I hope KDE project will start collaborating on this effort and use KWinFT as their primary compositor.

[You-]

It is good to experiment and see if it can be simplified, but I cant see losing shadows for windows being acceptable outside full screen/tiling use cases.

[woprandi]

It is good to experiment and see if it can be simplified, but I cant see losing shadows for windows being acceptable outside full screen/tiling use cases.

Shading, not shadows

[polarathene]

Just in case anyone was curious what shading was referring to and didn't want to go through the blog, find a link and look up the definition, this is it:

Shading

Some desktop environments offer shading (also known as rollup) as an alternative to iconification. A shaded window typically shows only the titlebar, the client window is hidden, thus shading is not useful for windows which are not decorated with a titlebar. - Source

I don't know how useful of a feature that'd be to people usually? It basically just resizes your window vertically into the height of the titlebar to minimize but keep it around, then restore the original vertical height when desired. Most people probably just minimize normally or manually resize temporarily?

[R41N3R]

This sounds fantastic and I will certainly try it. At some point I wondered why it got so quite without any news in the last weeks :-)

I had some issues with KWinFT 5.20 Wayland and had to go back to classic KWin, but it showed a lot of promise. Roman is doing exceptional work. And it seems like he is addressing the issues like adaptive sync in the future.

Reading the news about the rewrite I expected that he might focus on Wayland only to get rid of the legacy code (like gamescope). But wow, he got X11 covered as well.