KDE Plasma 5.25's Exciting Improvements For KWin, Continued Wayland Optimizations

With Plasma 5.25 now under a soft feature freeze ahead of its official release next month, KDE developers are focusing on bug fixing as well as talking more about all of the changes they managed to land this cycle.

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii published a blog post today outlining all of the KWin compositor / window manager improvements that users will be able to enjoy with Plasma 5.25.

Plasma 5.25's KWin is bringing improved support for gestures, kwayland-server and KWin have been merged, rewriting more desktop effects in QML, a new blend effect, compositing improvements, screencasting improvements, refactoring of window management code, and more.

The merging of KWin and KWayland-Server back together will ease new Wayland protocol support and allow for fixing some design issues moving forward.

The screencasting work for Plasma 5.25 now allows capturing of a rectangular region of the screen if simply wanting to cast a portion / desired window and not the entire screen. Compositing work in Plasma 5.25 included refactoring of the DRM back-end and compositing abstractions, and other engineering improvements. One specific optimization is more efficient handling of invisible windows on Wayland.

Learn more about the KWin improvements in Plasma 5.25 via Vlad's blog.