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, freed from bindings to Qt. The purpose of the fork is to allow for more active development of Kwin, increasing the functionality required for Wayland, as well as optimizing rendering. Classic Kwin suffers from being too slow to accept patches, as the KDE team doesn't want to risk a huge number of users for whom innovating too aggressively can break the workflow. Many patches have been under review for years, which greatly slows down the implementation of Wayland and various internal code refactorings. KwinFT is positioned as a transparent replacement for Kwin, and is already available in Manjaro. However, the developers warn of a possible breakdown in compatibility in the future. In its current form, KwinFT provides the following features that are not available in vanilla Kwin:
- A complete overhaul of the compositing process, which allowed to reduce delays when working both in Wayland and in X11;
- Wayland extension support wp_viewporter, which improves the work of video players, and is also necessary for a future version of Xwayland, in which added support for screen resolution emulation in many older games;
- Full support for display rotation and mirroring under Wayland.
KwinFT and Wrapland are expected to ship on all Linux distributions soon. Wrapland is planned to be turned into a pure C ++ library, as well as to provide seamless support for third-party, in-demand technologies in it. For example, support for the Wlroots protocol has already been added to it. wlr-output-manager, which allowed set screen options in Wlroots-based composers (like Sway) via KScreen.
Source: linux.org.ru