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

[Nocifer]

KWinFT, the most advanced, most modern windowing compositor in the world [...] this revolution was necessary now [...] KWinFT's vibrating, pumping and now finally again blossoming heart

How modest.

Well, it is only fair to the reader if you provide examples instead of just pain points without any reference. I think we all are old enough to verify the sources and to make up our own opinion. If you look at Nate's blog you get bug reports/commits and names as well. How are you otherwise supposed to talk about something if you do not provide this vital information?

On the other hand, simply describing the situation and referring to the "current KWin maintainer" namelessly, leaving us old enough people to look them up further if we wanted to check the facts, instead of talking about him in a way that stinks of bitter personal differences, would have probably been more than enough, not to mention mature.

[ssokolow]

This is a cultural thing, at least in part. E.g. in the US Coca-Cola is allowed to make a commercial where they say "we're better than Pepsi". On the other side of the pond, they aren't allowed to do that. They must go with "we're better than other competing products".
That's why some people are ok with naming names, some aren't.
Imho, it's ok to name names when the situation calls for it, just make sure not to make it all about people.

I think that has to do with trademark law preventing you from piggybacking on a competing product's trademarks.

[polarathene]

Seems I forgot to finish/send this message the other day (too many tabs and windows up haha).

That would switch all my monitors when all I want to do is do a quick temporary swap on the middle one.

Yeah, with dual-monitor setup I understand that. It's not great sadly, it's something that tiling window managers have been able to do IIRC, but didn't seem like it was worth the effort to see if i3 would work well with Plasma, I know it's possible but not sure if it supports that functionality well or has any other drawbacks.

Maybe something KWinFT could eventually support I think I asked about this being possible on KWin and got told that it wasn't possible due to the codebase/architecture. With Wayland it might be more manageable since displays are treated as separate buffers/whatevers.

I've made do with switching virtual desktops anyway as most of my windows can be categorized to a specific activity/project (unrelated to KDE Activities, I don't use that, and KWinFT is dropping such anyway).

Another problem with present windows is that it has the same problem as with the taskbar. I have to slow down to find the window I'm looking for because I may have an active set of five or six windows spread in four columns across three screens (two or three stacked in one of the columns) plus my slide-down terminal, with another 10-30 windows in my "non-active set" sitting behind the rest. With my current approach, it's just "slam cursor to top row of pixels, double-click, maybe move it down and scroll-wheel around then slam back up again, double-click a second time to return to what I'm working on".

Fair enough!

Perhaps my previous reply suggests a better solution that could be done. As the usage of shade from everyone here seems to only be used for single active window temporarily being collapsed, an effect similar to "Show Desktop" that just hides the active window instead and reveals it again when triggered once more (be that a hot edge/corner trigger for mouse, touchpad gesture or keyboard shortcut, etc). Seems it'd solve the main issue and serve the same common purpose?

[bug77]

I think that has to do with trademark law preventing you from piggybacking on a competing product's trademarks.

Or it's about letting companies make broad statements that you can't really refute because they're not aimed at anyone specific.

Anyway, like I said, different mindsets behind either stance.

[ssokolow]

Fair enough!

Perhaps my previous reply suggests a better solution that could be done. As the usage of shade from everyone here seems to only be used for single active window temporarily being collapsed, an effect similar to "Show Desktop" that just hides the active window instead and reveals it again when triggered once more (be that a hot edge/corner trigger for mouse, touchpad gesture or keyboard shortcut, etc). Seems it'd solve the main issue and serve the same common purpose?

I suppose, if need be, I could port this old KDE3 hack to modern Qt. (I puts tiny un-managed windows in the corners of the desktop which make it look MacOS Classic rounded and, when you scroll on them, it calls DCOP methods.)

...or, since I'd probably be using libwnck, probably modern GTK instead. It's not as if I'd be using those G̶N̶O̶M̶E̶GTK 3.x widgets I'd need to fight to restyle to match KDE look and feel.

[schmalzler]

As the usage of shade from everyone here seems to only be used for single active window temporarily being collapsed, an effect similar to "Show Desktop" that just hides the active window instead and reveals it again when triggered once more (be that a hot edge/corner trigger for mouse, touchpad gesture or keyboard shortcut, etc). Seems it'd solve the main issue and serve the same common purpose?

Read my previous comment again active window OR DIALOG! Modal dialogs have the property that there is no seperate task item in the taskbar and minimizing the dialog minimizes its parent window. However shading just the dialog works fine. I use this e.g. when writing tex documents: I open the "save file" dialog, navigate to the saving destination, and then just want to have a glimpse at how I named the chapter. (I tend to split each chapter or even section in a seperate file and import it into the main tex file - keeps things more managable for me).

[digitaltrails]

I've asked it several times, but maybe this topic is a little bit more related to it:

Have any of you managed to get two diferent screen scales with X11? I have a HiDPI display and another HD one. I know that it's not supported by Plasma, but maybe changing configuration files or something...

I tried wayland this weekend and this works, but it was very buggy. A lot of stuff didn't work. I've seen that it has improved a lot in last releases, but I'm stuck in 5.19.5 (kubuntu backports didn't release 5.20 and I don't think they'll release 5.21), so I would prefer staying X11 where everything works perfect

Depending on what you want to achieve, I wrote up my own KDE/plasma configuration of a HiDPI 4K monitor plus a WUXGA (1920x1200) monitor on the opensuse forums: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...nt-resolutions

In my case the monitors are in a fixed configuration which simplifies things a bit.

[curfew]

I think that has to do with trademark law preventing you from piggybacking on a competing product's trademarks.

No, it's wider than that. In the USA companies can apparently bullshit their customers all they want, without repercussions. But e.g. in Europe every claim has to be backed by facts.

"Better than Pepsi" is obviously a subjective, unquantifiable opinion and therefore not a fact and therefore companies aren't allowed to represent it as one.

[ktecho]

Depending on what you want to achieve, I wrote up my own KDE/plasma configuration of a HiDPI 4K monitor plus a WUXGA (1920x1200) monitor on the opensuse forums: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...nt-resolutions

In my case the monitors are in a fixed configuration which simplifies things a bit.

Yeah, I have the 4K screen in the laptop and 2k in an external monitor. It would be fine to be able to disconnect the external one from time to time and not having to reboot to change the scale as I'm doing now

I'll try your approach this weekend and let's see if I can come up with something. Thanks!

[jospoortvliet]

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

Honestly I think they should just ignore such an ego trip. It will fizzle out when the ego stops getting enough food... These kind of forks have rarely any real impact... Too bad, but if you can't play with others that generally means you have little impact in open source, no matter how good you (think you) are.