KDE's KWin Compositor Sees Near Total Rewrite Of Compositing Code.

KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop.

Merged to KWin as an excellent start to 2021 is a rework of the compositing scheduling. Vlad Zahorodnii overhauled the code that should lead to latency reductions for all compositing operations, a user toggle whether low-latency or smooth animations are preferred, support for mixed refresh rate displays on Wayland, and more. The big rework was merged and will appear with Plasma 5.21.

This week Plasma also saw a new Kickoff menu that is a complete rewrite, which is also coming with Plasma 5.21. There have also been many bug fixes, performance improvements, and other ongoing UI refinements.

More details on these great changes to KDE for kicking off 2021 via this blog post providing a weekly summary by KDE developer Nate Graham.