KWinFT 5.24 Released - Continues To Advance Its Wayland Support, Expand On Wlroots

Along with yesterday marking the release of KDE Plasma 5.24, KWinFT 5.24 debuted as the newest version of this KWin compositor fork that continues focusing on providing Wayland support, new features, and modernizing the codebase.

Over the past year KWinFT has been working to build upon wlroots, the Wayland compositor library started by Sway and now used by several Wayland compositors. For KWinFT 5.24, the wlroots integration continued expanding. KWinFT now handles buffer allocation through wlroots and fully utilizing the EGL context created by wlroots. In turn a lot of KWinFT code can be removed and more wlroots integration moving forward.

KWinFT 5.24 has also been advancing when it comes to the goals of being able to provide Wayland-only and X11-only libraries. This all is about increasing the modularity around the project and splitting out more code in the future.

Some of the other KWinFT 5.24 changes include improved inter-client data sharing, stabilizing its DRM leasing code, support for virtual keyboards, effects plugins improvements, and more.

Those interested in learning more about KWinFT 5.24 can do so via the release announcement from lead KWinFT developer Roman Gilg.