KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further.
KDE News Archives
1,290 KDE open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!
KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features.
In addition to shipping the Plasma 5.21 beta this week, KDE developers were very active in not only working out fixes for next month's Plasma 5.21 desktop but also other improvements to KDE applications.
KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year.
KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack.
KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop.
While development on KDE (and other open-source projects too) was lighter this week as a result of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the KDE desktop still saw some refinements this week.
KDE developer Nate Graham who has made a lot of contributions to KDE in recent years and is well known for his weekly KDE development summaries has published a 2021 roadmap for the year.
KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem.
Even with Christmas week there has been a lot of improvements still happening in the KDE world.
Winter holidays haven't yet slowed down the pace of improvements for the KDE desktop stack. It was another busy week enhancing KDE Plasma and related desktop components with new functionality and fixes.
Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support.
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary highlighting the desktop project's changes for the week. WebRTC support with the screencast code in Plasma now works on Wayland, but the Plasma Wayland changes are lighter than we've seen in recent weeks. Instead the emphasis this week seems to have been on enhancing KDE's usability.
KDE Plasma users will hopefully be seeing the KWin Wayland compositor perform better and more reliably in 2021.
KDE developers have been busy so far in December making improvements from seemingly never-ending Wayland improvements to new features like easier support for accented character input without having to remember key sequences or changing your keyboard layout.
KDE developers remain as busy as ever even with pandemic and Christmas season upon us.
Ahead of the holidays the KDE development work is as busy as ever from Plasma 5.21 to its large desktop application set.
KDE Plasma Mobile continues working its way into increasing polished form and with deployments on the likes of the PinePhone have shown it can be quite a capable open-source mobile Linux contender.
It's been another busy week of bug fixing in the KDE space along with other feature work, including on the Plasma Wayland front.
The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack.
For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates.
The bug fixing in KDE land continues and ends the month with a "bug massacre", for how KDE developer Nate Graham describes it in his weekly recaps.
KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software.
This week marked the release of Plasma 5.20 while KDE developers continue working towards not only Plasma 5.21 as the next desktop feature release but also providing fixes for next month's Plasma 5.20.1 release and the growing collection of KDE applications.
Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.20 release, KWinFT 5.20 has been released as the fork of KWin and other select components in aiming to offer a better experience.
KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment.
Krita 4.4 is out today as the latest release for this flagship open-source digital painting program.
KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21.
Not only is the Plasma 5.20 desktop shining and more Wayland improvements and other enhancements queuing for Plasma 5.21, but the Plasma Mobile effort is also beginning to shine.
Launched at the start of the year was the Kubuntu Focus as a polished KDE laptop while now it's been succeeded by a second-generation model.
KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing.
While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs.
KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin focused on better Wayland support and other modernization efforts is approaching its first stable release next month around the same time as KDE Plasma 5.20.
Following the recent Plasma 5.20 beta release, KDE developers have been landing many fixes for the Plasma 5.20 desktop ahead of its official release in October.
Disman is the display management library forked from LibKScreen as part of KWinFT. Last week at XDC2020 an update was provided on this Qt/C++ library for display management.
The beta of the forthcoming Krita 4.4 is now available, which continues on as easily the leading open-source digital painting programs.
Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications.
KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries characterized this week as "the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week!"
If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop.
KDE Frameworks 5.74 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit.
Akademy 2020 took place virtually this week as the annual gathering of KDE developers.
KDE has kicked off the new month with some interesting improvements.
KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week.
KDE applications finally have the ability to keeping their window positions preserved when closed and then re-launched.
KDE developers remain very busy tacking new features onto Plasma 5.20 and other improvements for polishing their desktop.
KDE has shipped their latest collection of applications with newest feature updates.
Getting KDE's Wayland session into shape remains a priority for developers this year and it's looking like the support should be quite slick come Plasma 5.20.
Even with everything going on in the world around the coronavirus and warm summer temperatures, KDE developers continue making improvements on their desktop stack, including around Wayland support.
KDE Plasma 5.20 is bringing an important feature in further closing the gap between Wayland and X11 feature parity... Finally there will be working screen recording and screencasting on Wayland for compatible applications.
1290 KDE news articles published on Phoronix.