KWinFT Going Through Code Refactoring, Working On WLROOTS-Based Usage

Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work.

KWinFT lead developer Roman Gilg published a new blog post today outlining the recent and upcoming work around this fork. Some of the highlights include:

- Reworking central parts of KWinFT and other core code had been much of the focus over this past winter while also taking somewhat of a break for the "5.22" cycle. With the KWinFT 5.22 state the code should be further stabilized and ready to bring on the next round of feature development.

- The KWinFT 5.22 code does allow now for the Wayland session to drive different displays at their own optimal refresh rates. The refresh rates are no longer tied to the common denominator across the displays but can drive each display individually at its best rate while still avoiding any tearing.

- KWinFT has been working towards render and display back-ends that leverage the existing WLROOTS library. WLROOTS was made well known as part of the Sway compositor effort and sees new usage elsewhere, with the latest now being branched code for KWinFT. Leveraging WLROOTS in KWinFT will allow removing a lot of code, share features from upstream WLROOTS, and provide other code sharing advantages and less Wayland fragmentation.

More details as to the current KWinFT happenings can be found via Roman's blog.