KWin turns 12

Today twelve years ago at 23:26 Matthias Ettrich did the first ever commit to KWin:

Say hello to kwin. WARNING: NOT USABLE YET. See README.

Given this nice warning we also have to show the content of the README:

This is the beginning of kwin, kwm next generation.
WARNING: this thing is hardly usable now, neither ICCCM nor KDE
compliant yet!
All it has is a context menu that allows you to switch between two
decoration styles, KDE classic and an experimental style.
Please don’t work on the code, I’ll finish it during my summer
vacations (four weeks from now on).
kwin was only commited to allow people like Mosfet to have a look at
the Client API (and StdClient) to write nifty new themable decorations.
Have fun,

Matthias

As we can see KWin has its root in KWM from KDE 1 (there are still one or two comments in KWin source tree saying KWM) and it seems like the capitalizations was added in later times 🙂

Matthias seems to have been a little bit too enthusiastic about how much time it needs to write a window manager. It took 8251 commits (1195 translation commits) by 284 contributors (including scripty and cvs/svn migration tools) to get to where we are today. And still we are not finished with KWin. After adding Compositing Support to the Window Manager we are now adressing the second big transition to support more than just X11. So exciting times are ahead of us.

Let’s work together to make KWin rock the next 12 years even more than the last 12. Billions of devices are out there which want to be using KWin as their Wayland Compositor. Let’s work on the future for the free software eco system!

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

7 Replies to “KWin turns 12”

Wow, happy 12:th birthday KWin! 🙂

Nice work people and Happy birthday! It’s really good KWin, and i hope it keeps getting better,
By the way, you’ve mentioned Matthias Ettrich, does he still working on kde?

(sorry about my english, still learning)