Roman Gilg has just released a Beta of his exciting KWinFT project.
Detailed information can be found on his blog:
You can already test the new beta packages on our testing and unstable branches by installing kwinft-beta, which will ask you to replace kwinft (or kwin) and also pull in kdisplay-beta, wrapland-beta and disman-beta.
Have fun testing some bleeding edge software and please post your observations here!
Thanks @oberon! I’m here for feedback and questions.
Since Disman comes with the big changes this release let me quickly remind you that Disman (and KDisplay) are independent of the KWinFT compositor and even of the Plasma workspace in general.
I would be especially interested in test results from other desktop environments like XFCE on X11 since I only tested myself with KWinFT (Wayland + X11) and sway.
$ sudo pacman -S kwinft-beta
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: kwinft-beta and kwin-git are in conflict (kwin). Remove kwin-git? [y/N] y
:: kdisplay-beta and kscreen-git are in conflict (kscreen). Remove kscreen-git? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing kwin-git breaks dependency 'kwin-git' required by plasma-workspace-git
kwinft-beta provides kwinft and it provides kwin, but NOT kwin-git.
The kwinft-beta packages are intended to match stable packages, you cannot combine them with kde-dev (git) packages, sorry.
From their pages it seems that end users can expect these goodies:
But there are already some experimental features in the first release that you might look out for:
My rework of KWin's composition pipeline that, according to some early feedback last year, improves the presentation greatly on X11 and Wayland. Additionally a timer was added to minimize the latency from image creation to its depiction on screen.
The Wayland viewporter extension was implemented enabling better presentation of content for example for video players and with the next XWayland major release to emulate resolution changes for many older games.
Full support for output rotation and mirroring in the Wayland session.
That’s actually a good idea and no problem at all. I will include them from now on, so kwinft-git, disman-git, kdisplay-git and wrapland-git will be available later today
I have 2 screens, laptop’s one to the left, external monitor’s - to the right, set as the primary one. X11, hybrid graphics (Intel + Nvidia). After the installation of kwinft, disman and stuff, I am observing wrong arrangement of my screens: laptop’s one has become the primary, and this is a persistent thing: even if I change this, on the next Plasma start it is primary again.
When selecting Nvidia, things get even worse: sddm froze for a while, then greeted me again with a user/password prompt.
I have no idea why monitors number higher than 1 has such a strong tradition to put Linux desktop on its knees
Thank you very much. I get the same error with kwinft-git:
$ sudo pacman -S kwinft-git
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: kwinft-git and kwin-git are in conflict (kwin). Remove kwin-git? [y/N] y
:: kdisplay-git and kscreen-git are in conflict (kscreen). Remove kscreen-git? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing kwin-git breaks dependency 'kwin-git' required by plasma-workspace-git
I’ve checked one more time I noticed the following:
After I hit Apply button to make another screen primary, and move my mouse, the checkbox instantly gets blank and Apply button gets active (clickable) again.
Another issue: after logging in to Wayland session and playing with monitors’ settings (they were auto-detected incorrectly: laptop’s screen was set to resolution higher than FullHD, which was wrong), and logging in back to X11 session, screens were mirrored.
I am not sure if it is worth creating an issue ticket though, since I am not good at logging such stuff. So just describing what I’ve encountered with. OK, it’s too late for catching bugs in my timezone. Have a good day.
PS: Good news is that that Nvidia-related thing I mentioned above (SDDM freezing) wasn’t caused by kwinft or whatnot, I just had to reboot first (after the installation of your programs).
You should be using KWinFT after installation even if the executable says kwin_x11 (the executables of KWinFT have the same names as KWin for integration).
You can control that you’re running KWinFT by checking the libraries the running instance is linking against: