KWinFT 5.20 With Aims For Better Wayland/X11 Experience Than KDE Plasma 5.20's KWin

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.20 release, KWinFT 5.20 has been released as the fork of KWin and other select components in aiming to offer a better experience.

KWinFT continues to be led by KDE developer Roman Gilg. KWinFT continues to work on not only providing a more robust Wayland compositor but also improved display management and other capabilities.

In terms of KWinFT compared to upstream KWin in Plasma 5.20, Gilg argues, "I believe in regards to stability and robustness KWinFT is superior. In particular this holds true for multi-display setups and display management. Although I worked mostly on Disman in the last two months that work naturally spilled over to KWinFT too. KWinFT's output objects are now much more reasonably implemented. Besides that there were many more bug fixes to outputs handling what you can convince yourself of by looking at the merged changes for 5.20 in KWinFT and Wrapland."

The X11 experience for KWinFT is also said to be much better off, "If you usually run an X11 session you should choose KWinFT without hesitation. It provides the same features as KWin and comes with an improved compositing pipeline that lowers latency and increases smoothness. There are also patches in the work to improve upon this further for multi-display setups. These patches might come to the 5.20 release via a bug fix release."

More details on the KWinFT 5.20 release via the release announcement.