KWinFT: KDE's KWin Forked To Focus On Better Wayland Support, Modern Technologies

Longtime KDE developer and former Blue Systems engineer, Roman Gilg, has announced his forking of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor and the subsequent first release of this new KWinFT project.

KWinFT is out with its first public release as a drop-in replacement for the upstream KWin window manager as well as its KWayland library. Replacing the KWayland library is Wrapland as its new fork. KWinFT + Wrapland has been underway since the start of 2020 to "accelerate the development significantly in comparison to classic KWin."

KWinFT has been undergoing a rework of its composition pipeline for better presentation handling on both X11 and Wayland, less display latency, a Wayland viewporter extension, and full support for output rotation+mirroring on Wayland.

KWin+Wrapland will be focused on a modern, optimized development process, focusing on great Wayland support, and for the Wrapland support library to be written in modern C++ without relying on Qt.

More details on this very promising fork of KWin via Roman Gilg's blog. It will be very interesting to see where KWin+Wrapland head over the course of 2020 for hopefully putting KDE on a much better Wayland footing and addressing many longstanding defects in KWin.