KWin Is Now Running On OpenGL ES 2.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KWin Is Now Running On OpenGL ES 2.0

For a while we have known that KDE developers have been interested in supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 (and OpenGL 3.x) within the KWin compositing window manager as well as using more OpenGL within the Plasma Desktop and on the KWin front the developers, led by Martin Grä�lin, they have been making great progress towards KDE SC 4.7 where this work will be introduced...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODgzNw

[KAMiKAZOW]

ES works fine with all Gallium drivers. And no, I’m not planning to actually dropping the current backend, I just want to provide an alternative for those wanting to give it a try

That was posted in Martin's blog post comments.

[DanL]

I'm not a big KDE user, but that's awesome. Lowering the entry-barrier for Kwin with one backend while pushing forward with the other = more converted Ubuntu/GNOME users.

[pingufunkybeat]

Right now most of his testing is being done atop the Nouveau Gallium3D driver with Mesa's OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 support.

This is very nice to hear. If it works with nouveau, it should work with most Mesa drivers, so we'll probably avoid the breakage that we had with 4.5 in the future.

[V!NCENT]

I realy like this! Instead having a seperate legacy OpenGL backend, they choose to have OpenGL ES. Awesome job.

Although I am back to Windows 7 for a while untill it breaks itself again, like one day after the install where it made a recovery boot entry that pushed the regular boot entry outside of readable bootsectors ... Windows is still Windows. They'll never learn...

[pedepy]

how bout they just get it working, period?

ever since about two major updates ago, kwin totally broke down for me; aside from crashing on every other attempt to launch it, if it does run for more than 30 seconds, the performance is horrible.

blame it on whatever you want: nothing else broke other than kwin. i'm back to running compiz, which is snappier and more stable than kwin ever was.