Roman Gilg, one of the active developers of Kwin and Xwayland, introduced a fork of the Kwin window manager called KwinFT (Fast Track), as well as a completely redesigned version of the Kwayland library called Wrapland, which is free from dependencies on Qt. The goal of the fork is to enable more active development of Kwin, enhance the functionality required for Wayland, and optimize rendering. Classic Kwin suffers from a slow patch acceptance process, as the KDE team is reluctant to risk breaking the workflow of its vast user base with overly aggressive innovations. Many patches have been under review for years, significantly slowing down the adoption of Wayland and various internal code refactorings. KwinFT is positioned as a transparent replacement for Kwin and is already available in Manjaro. However, developers caution about potential compatibility breaks in the future. In its current form, KwinFT provides the following features not present in vanilla Kwin:
- A complete overhaul of the compositing process, which reduces latency when working in both Wayland and X11;
- Support for the Wayland extension wp_vieporter, which enhances video player performance and is also necessary for the upcoming version of Xwayland, which has added supports screen resolution emulation in many old games;
- Full support for rotating and mirroring displays under Wayland.
KwinFT and Wrapland are expected to be included in all Linux distributions soon. Wrapland is planned to be transformed into a pure C++ library, ensuring seamless support for popular third-party technologies. For instance, support for the Wlroots protocol wlr-output-manager, which allows screen settings to be configured in Wlroots-based compositors (such as Sway) through KScreen..
Source: linux.org.ru
