Posted on by Martin Flöser

This Week in KWin (2012, week 30)

The major event of this week was of course the tagging of 4.9.0. We have two important fixes which made it into 4.9 and apart from that not much happened. My current work on Aurorae is not yet finished and has not been pushed yet. The work on it also discovered two small regressions in Aurorae 3 and I’m quite unhappy that we will ship 4.9 now with two known regressions. But they will of course be fixed for 4.9.1.

I want to use this rather quiet week to remember everybody about the importance of reporting issues early. We got today a bug report where the user mentions that he noticed this issue already with 4.7 and 4.8. Well by know it was already fixed in 4.9 and the user is unhappy that he does not benefit from the fix as he uses Debian Testing (which won’t go to 4.9 any time soon). If an issue gets reported when it got introduced more users will benefit from the fix and it’s much easier to fix the bug as it is more likely that we remember what we worked on.

Please report bugs only in English language. This week 2 of the 18 reported bugs were not in English. This makes it much more difficult to handle the bugs as there is a language barrier. For me even a bug report in German is completely useless. I use my software only in English and have problems with back translating the German translation to English.

Summary

Crash Fixes

  • 304026: KCM crashes on updating a deco’s settings because the lib is conditionally unloaded in new ::canLoad()
    This change will be available in version 4.9.0
    Git Commit

Bug Fixes

  • 303937: Quick tiling (snap) uses wrong geometry on alternate attempts.
    This change will be available in version 4.9.0
    Git Commit

New Features

    Tasks

      13 Replies to “This Week in KWin (2012, week 30)”

      1. > I use my software only in English and have problems with back translating the German translation to English.
        Do you think thos bug-reporting users like me, who only use the software in german, have less problems back translating the german translation?

        1. Each application supports switching the language. So yes for a user it is easy to report without back translating

          1. Well, not really.
            When I set System Settings from German to English, the individual KCMs are still partially German (probably the strings extracted from .desktop files).

      2. Hi Martin,
        KDE 4.9 rc2 läuft gut!. Weiter so !

        Ich würde mir wünschen das KDE (z.b. 5.0) mal wieder ein neues Default Design definiert. Das aktuelle ist in meinen Augen grausam und verspielt.

        1. The question is whether there will be a new default design in future versions. This I cannot answer because I’m a developer and not a designer

      3. Hi Martin,
        i have read your “Benchmark” Article at freiesmagazin. I think GUI Benchmarking is not really important. More important is the click latency of “GUI stuff” and no lagging animations of Window resize/minimize/expand and Workspace change. Can you explain to me why KWin (opengl/raster) cant under certain conditions (background located Window) animate smooth ? May be that for each animation cycle will KWin redraw each GUI Element instead of a simple Bitmap copyring (Background Bitmap Backup, draw animation cycle, Page Flipp and back to top) ?
        Sorry for my “perfect” English 🙁

        1. Let’s just say: it’s non-trivial and complex. Pretty much depends on:

          • Application in question
          • Used Widget style
          • Used window decoration
          • Used Qt graphics system of both application and KWin
          • Used compositing backend

              1. DAM Nvidia Driver !

                Important Improvement:
                My GTX 275 will almost never level up the GPU Clock in Adaptive Mode. I have forced him at the xorg.conf to a higher default GPU clock:

                xorg.conf
                Section “Device”
                Identifier “Default Device”
                Option “NoLogo” “True”
                Option “Coolbits” “1”
                Option “RegistryDwords” “PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x2”
                EndSection
                —–
                # default GPU / Mem clock is now a little higher

                With disable Animations on Window decorator and this Nvidia correction is KWin very very sexy! Maybe i can help with this posting other users.

      4. Hello, Martin. Thank you for all your awesome work. Can you please tell me, were I can find the code for the KWin decorations in C++. I would like to make a new decoration and I would like to have a start point. Thank you very much!

        1. I would highly recommend to not write a C++ decoration, but a QML one . If you insist of using C++ you find examples in our git repository and documentation in our wikis.

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