KWin in Tokamak IV

Unfortunately Tokamak is already over for me 🙁 I’m just sitting in the train back home, as my Thesis wants to get some finishing touch. I really enjoyed these three days. From the social point of view Tokamak is just like Akademy a great experience. And this Tokamak was really big. The openSUSE offices are a perfect place for the sprint as there is one room big enough for all of us and several small meeting rooms for the small breakout groups. Thanks again to Will for organizing everything.

On Saturday we mainly had presentations and today the breakout groups started. In the morning we had a small discussion about activities/context/whateveritscalledthesedays and came up with a small API for activitiy management. Looks like the KWin part will be easier to do as initially expected as we can use quite some of the virtual desktop code to (un)hide windows whenever the activity changes.

After lunch we started two discuss Plasma/KWin integration. I had a list of points for better integration and the funny thing is, that most of the issues the Plasma guys and girl mentioned were on this list. Quite good that we see the same points for improvements. The discussions were really productive and I think we found consensus in all discussed topics which will hopefully result in code written and a way better user experience. One of the discussed issues was an improved dashboard. Currently the dashboard is just a normal window, resulting in issues like it’s possible to alt+tab or start present windows. The idea is to tell KWin that the window is a dashboard and that we add special support for it including a nice fade-background effect replacing the currently black background rendered inside the dashboard.

Due to overlapping schedule I was unable to attend the mobile session. I will probably try to get KWin compiling on Maemo, which requires a port to OpenGL ES 1.1. I thought that N900 requires ES 2.0 which would require a shader scene and way more changes to KWin code base including huge #ifdef areas. OpenGL ES 1.1 on the other hand is just a stripped down version of OpenGL 1.5. So getting KWin compiling should be much easier. Of course there have to be some changes as some currently used calls are unsupported, but removing glBegin/glEnd and switching from rendering quads to triangles will probably improve overall KWin and as I have a "port" of KWin to OpenGL 3 in my local git repository I can (hopefully) just cherry-pick those changes.

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7 Replies to “KWin in Tokamak IV”

    1. Comments in my blog post are not the right place to demand features. Reading a comment like that, really help to get your feature, as it’s totally motivating if user’s start to demand.

      Just as a note: the comments are moderated. Any other off-topic comment will be removed.

  1. was wondering is there any interest of possibly starting to support the Lighthouse/Wayland combo with kwin as that combo should be way less resource-hog than X?

    unless all the functionality of the kwin would be brought via that combo of course. 😉

    of course that would bring in all the OpenGL3/OpenCL/Gallium3D API goodies as well as Wayland is based on all that DRI2/KMS gen stuff…

    the Lighthouse is also expected to be the way to do it in embedded environments (like MeeGo) as it is meant to be replacing Qt’s old QWS.

    1. If Wayland is using X11 a port could be possible. If it is not using X11 it does not make sense to port KWin as KWin is built upon the assumption that it is only for X11.

      Given the current development speed of Wayland we have lots of time to decide a strategy.

  2. Does KWin on the N900 make sense, even if its possible? Mostly I think we should see Maemo kind of the same way we do Windows, a place to port apps and maybe even widgets but not with the goal of replacing the platform.

    Great to hear about KWin & Plasma integration.

    1. That’s something we will know when we finished the port. At least for Maemo it’s possible as it’s using X11.

  3. excuse my question…i know that you are developer of kwin..i did hope that blur effect entries in trunk for kde sc 4.5..i believed that in tokamark 4 you talk about the features of kwin..
    the blog post explains of kwin…right?

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