Valve Is Funding Improvements To KDE's KWin & More Work On X.Org

As some good news this week amid all the 32-bit Linux gaming drama this week and the networking snafu... Valve is now funding another developer to work on upstream open-source code, in particular on the KDE side this time with a developer who had been working for Blue Systems.

Longtime open-source developer Roman Gilg is now working under contract for Valve. He will be focusing on "certain gaming-related XServer projects and improve KWin in this regard and for general desktop usage."

On the KDE side with KWin he's working on some improvements for both X11/Wayland paths, including a reworking of the compositing pipeline. With the reworked compositing pipeline it could allow for separate CPU threads per display outputs, better vblank handling, and other benefits.

On the X.Org Server front Roman is pursuing auto-list compositing that could help lower latency around gaming and other improvements.

It's great to see Valve continuing to fund these upstream infrastructure improvements to Linux from X.Org and the graphics drivers to desktops. Unfortunately for these X.Org improvements given the current lack of coordinating around a xorg-server 1.21, those changes likely won't hit Linux desktops until next year.

More details on this contract work for Valve and other Linux/KDE improvements he's tackling can be found via this blog post.