What a Week

I am just enjoying my last day at Tokamak 5 in Nijmegen and wow that has been a productive week. Personally I have of course mostly worked on the Plasma Compositor and Window Manager but I also helped on getting the Compositor better integrated into the various Plasma shells. My plans were to work on an easier to use Effects API and JavaScript binding but of course I did not have the time to work on it 😉 This task is no a little bit delayed and might be moved to the next release cycle as I would not be able to finish it till the hard freeze anyway.

There was quite some backlog of work from the OpenGL 2/OpenGL ES 2.0 work and I fixed all the issues I knew of. So e.g. cube and sphere effect are working again, there is a config option to enforce legacy OpenGL 1, the logout effect works again and KWin requires at least Mesa 7.10 if you use free drivers.

For Plasma Active I implemented a way to close windows from Present Windows effect in a nice touch friendly way. It will most likely not end in Plasma Active as we want to have something better than the normal Present Windows effect for tablets. KWin no longer requires window decorations which makes it possible to compile KWin completely without window decorations to reduce the package size and KWin won’t just crash if there is no decoration. As a nice side-effect that helps myself during development in case Oxygen evolved and I was not aware of it. If KWin is compiled without window decorations all windows are opened as maximized. In order to reduce the package size we are also looking into limiting the set of effects for Plasma Active and removing most of the window manager related configuration modules.

I finally merged the refactoring of the Outline handling by our new Google Summer of Code student Arthur and added an effect to it, so that it can be nicely styled and looks much better.

There are many more ideas to be implemented especially to further improve the user experience by better integrating the Plasma Compositor with the Plasma Shells.