KWinFT Compositor Now Known As Theseus' Ship

[spicfoo]

50K a year to work from home doing a job of passion

Ding ding ding. Passion like "exposure" is codeword for yes, you are taking a pay cut. I understand some developers will do that but my perspective is that working on open source software shouldn't require that if we want faster progress.

[X_m7]

There are many effect improvements, support for the Lima / V3D / VC4 drivers, starting XWayland on demand, using Qt 6, and many other X11 and Wayland improvements.

KWin already supports the Lima driver, the PinePhone uses that driver and KWin in the form of Plasma Mobile works, at least in version 5.27. I'm pretty sure V3D and VC4 are supported too, since those are the drivers used by the Raspberry Pi (4 and 5 use V3D, older ones use VC4), since I can find reports of KDE Plasma running on those.

It also supports running XWayland on demand already: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-..._requests/3527

And of course Qt6 is part of the 6.0 release, so none of what you've mentioned are unique to KWinFT/Theseus and is missing in upstream KWin.

[aviallon]

If you have resort to this kind of language to make your point, you lack one and you are also missing what the broader picture. If I know all those requirements including C, Rust, Glib and all the GNOME libraries, I can find remote jobs that pay better from anywhere else in the world. Even worker owned coops like Igalia pays better than this. This salary is just not competitive in the market. It has nothing to do with my personal cost of living silly.

It depends on where you live. 50 k$/year is not a bad salary at all in France, for instance. And I mean, 50 k$/year BEFORE taxes.

[skeevy420]

Ding ding ding. Passion like "exposure" is codeword for yes, you are taking a pay cut. I understand some developers will do that but my perspective is that working on open source software shouldn't require that if we want faster progress.

You're ignoring that, using my state's numbers, 40% of the people would be getting a raise or not having any increase in pay. It's only a loss in pay for 60% of the people. Yeah, it's low, but it isn't the worst or lowest end pay either and the fringe benefits would be top notch (that means something in the US).

Well, I meant passion as a job that you'd prefer to do over something that you'd settle with to pay the bills. 50K a year to work on KDE vs 50K a year to work on dental and medical databases.

Anyways, this is a rather moot conversation. I'm not a KDE Fundraising or Personnel Manager. If I was, I still think 50K/year is a fair rate for someone who could be totally green and fresh out of college in a lower cost of living area.

[skeevy420]

It depends on where you live. 50 k$/year is not a bad salary at all in France, for instance. And I mean, 50 k$/year BEFORE taxes.

Me too. Before taxes and benefits. I accounted for $10K/year in benefits per person and a months vacation.

[hedonist]

KDE is very welcoming community, but also very conservative in their choices. Because of this, i can completely understand the sentiment: politics together with unwillingness to change would make big jumps difficult if not impossible. Looking forward to see what is in plan for Theseus's ship.

Several questions though:

Why focus on OpenGL nowdays? Vulkan is supported since Skylake I think... and mobile since Android 7. Drivers are simpler, easier to maintain etc. even nvk is starting with Vulkan so should be easier to run on nvidia...

Why not make something without the legacy cruft and drop also xorg? Wayland is the future regardless of people liking it or not. Two most used distributions also have Wayland by default.

My PC doesnt support modern Vulkan, it only supports modern OpenGL, a lot of older programs still support or require OpenGL as well, there no reason to get rid of it or drop support for it, its not like Xorg and opengl isnt "legacy cruft".

[shmerl]

What I want to see is Kwin using Vulkan and explicit synchronization.

[ngraham]

Would you be able to disclose also the extend of this? How many people in total and is it all part time? What do those KDE people work on? What is the business model?

At any given time there are 10-15 people working on some part of KDE software (i.e. not all on Plasma). Some are full time, some are part time; depends on what they want. The company started out as a philanthropic endeavor, but today is more like a consultancy, more similar to KDAB.

[misp]

My PC doesnt support modern Vulkan, it only supports modern OpenGL, a lot of older programs still support or require OpenGL as well, there no reason to get rid of it or drop support for it, its not like Xorg and opengl isnt "legacy cruft".

From Wikipedia:

Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more efficient CPU and GPU usage compared to the older OpenGL and Direct3D 11 APIs. It does so by providing a considerably lower-level API for the application than the older APIs, that more closely resembles how modern GPUs work.

Vulkan was formally named and announced at Game Developers Conference 2015, although speculation and rumors centered around a new API existed beforehand and referred to it as "glNext".[57]




Glnext certainly sounds as new version. Would make the old one obsolete. In any case there are real reasons to replace OpenGL: performance, better drivers, easier maintenance and battery life. You can argue that performance benefits are not big enough, but maintenance burden is and this is important for drivers.


I'm not saying that OpenGL be dropped from whatever app, I'm saying compositor should not use it. Vulkan is released 8y ago. Until when should legacy hw reasons prevent moving to a better sw?


What hw do you actually use when Vulkan is not supported? How old is it?

[geearf]

It depends on where you live. 50 k$/year is not a bad salary at all in France, for instance. And I mean, 50 k$/year BEFORE taxes.

I was offered in the low 40k in France decades ago out of school, I don't think 50k today is that great.
In Spain though that is not bad still, but why not go for something like Igalia then? I'm sure they'd pay quite more and you could still work on FOSS projects.