KWinFT Project 5.20 Released

New versions of the KWinFT projects Wrapland, Disman, KWinFT and KDisplay are available now. They were on the day aligned with the release of Plasma 5.20 this week and offer new features and stability improvements.

Universal Display Management

The highlight this time is a completely redefined and reworked Disman that allows to control display configurations not only in a KDE Plasma session with KWinFT but also with KWin and in other Wayland sessions with wlroots-based compositors as well as any X11 session.

You can use it with the included command-line tool dismanctl or together with the graphical frontend KDisplay. Read more about Disman's goals and technical details in the 5.20 beta announcement.

KWinFT Projects You Should Use

Let's cut directly to the chase! As Disman and KDisplay are replacements for libkscreen and KScreen and KWinFT for KWin you will be interested in a comparison from a user point of view. What is better and what should you personally choose?

Disman and KDisplay for KDE Plasma

If you run a KDE Plasma desktop at the moment, you should definitely consider to use Disman and replace KScreen with KDisplay.

Disman comes with a more reliable overall design moving internal logic to its D-Bus service and away from the frontends in KDisplay. Changes by that become more atomic and bugs are less likely to emerge.

The UI of KDisplay is improved in comparison to KScreen and comfort functions have been added, as for example automatic selection of the best available mode.

There are still some caveats to this release that might prompt you to wait for the next one though:

• Albeit in the beta phase multiple bugs were discovered and could be fixed 5.20 is still the first release after a large redesign, so it is not unlikely more bugs will be discovered later on.
• If you want to use Disman and KDisplay in a legacy KWin Wayland session note that Disman was only tested with KWinFT and sway by me personally. Maybe other people already use it with legacy KWin in a Wayland session but the backend, that is loaded in this case, could very well have seen no QA at all yet. That being said if you run a KWin X11 session, you will experience no such problems since in this case the backend is the same as with KWinFT or any other X11 window manager.
• If you require the KDisplay UI in another language then this release is not yet for you. An online translation system has been setup now but the first localization will only become available with release 5.21.

So your mileage may vary but in most cases you should have a better experience with Disman and KDisplay.

And if you in general like to support new projects with ambitious goals and make use of most modern technologies you should definitely give it a try.

Disman and KDisplay with wlroots

Disman includes a backend for wlroots-backed compositors. I'm proud of this achievement since I believe we need more projects for the Linux desktop which do not only try to solve issues in their own little habitat and project monoculture but which aim at improving the Linux desktop in a more holistic and collaborative spirit.

I tested the backend myself and even provided some patches to wlroots directly to improve its output-management capabilities, so using Disman with wlroots should be a decent experience. One catch though is that for those patches above a new wlroots version must be released. For now you can only get them by compiling wlroots from master or having your distribution of choice backport them.

In comparison with other options to manage your displays in wlroots I believe Disman provides the most user-friendly solution taking off lots of work from your shoulders by automatically optimizing unknown new display setups and reloading data for already known setups.

Another prominent alternative for display management on wlroots is kanshi. I don't think kanshi is as easy to use and autonomously optimizing as Disman but you might be able to configure displays more precisly with it. So you could prefer kanshi or Disman depending on your needs.

You can use Disman in wlroots sessions as a standalone system with its included command-line tool dismanctl and without KDisplay. This way you do not need to pull in as many KDE dependencies. But KDisplay together with Disman and wlroots also works very well and provides you an easy-to-use UI for adapting the display configuration according to your needs.

Disman and KDisplay on X11

You will like it. Try it out is all I can say. The RandR backend is tested thoroughly and while there is still room for some refactoring it should work very well already. This is also independent of what desktop environment or window manager you use. Install it and see for yourself.

That being said the following issues are known at the moment:

• Only a global scale can be selected for all displays. Disman can not yet set different scales for different displays. This might become possible in the future but has certain drawbacks on its own.
• The global scale in X11 is set by KDisplay alone. So you must install Disman with KDisplay in case you want to change the global scale without writing to the respective X11 config files manually.
• At the time of writing there is a bug with Nvidia cards that leads to reduced refresh rates. But I expect this bug to be fixed very soon.

KWinFT vs KWin

I was talking a lot about Disman since it contains the most interesting changes this release and it can now be useful to many more people than before.

But you might also be interested in replacing KWin with KWinFT, so let's take a look at how KWinFT at this point in time compares to legacy KWin.

As it stands KWinFT is still a drop-in-replacement for it. You can install it to your system replacing KWin and use it together with a KDE Plasma session.

X11

If you usually run an X11 session you should choose KWinFT without hesitation. It provides the same features as KWin and comes with an improved compositing pipeline that lowers latency and increases smoothness. There are also patches in the work to improve upon this further for multi-display setups. These patches might come to the 5.20 release via a bug fix release.

One point to keep in mind though is that the KWinFT project will concentrate in the future on improving the experience with Wayland. We won't maliciously regress the X11 experience but if there is a tradeoff between improving the Wayland session and regressing X11, KWinFT will opt for the former. But if such a situation unfolds at some point in time has yet to be seen. The X11 session might as well continue to work without any regressions for the next decade.

Wayland

The situation is different if you want to run KWinFT as a Wayland compositor. I believe in regards to stability and robustness KWinFT is superior.

In particular this holds true for multi-display setups and display management. Although I worked mostly on Disman in the last two months that work naturally spilled over to KWinFT too. KWinFT's output objects are now much more reasonably implemented. Besides that there were many more bug fixes to outputs handling what you can convince yourself of by looking at the merged changes for 5.20 in KWinFT and Wrapland.

If you have issues with your outputs in KWin definitely try out KWinFT, of course together with Disman.

Another area where you probably will have a better experience is the composition itself. As on X11 the pipeline was reworked. For multi-display setups the patch, that was linked above and might come in a bug fix release to 5.20, should improve the situation further.

On the other side KWin's Wayland session gained some much awaited features with 5.20. According to the changelog screencasting is now possible, as is middle-click pasting and integration with Klipper, that is the clipboard management utility in the system tray.

I say "in theory" because I have not tested it myself and I expect it to not work without issues. That is for one because big feature additions like these regularly require later adjustments due to unforeseen behavior changes but also because on a principal and strategic level I disagree with the KWin developers' general approach here.

The KWin codebase is rotten and needs a rigorous overhaul. Putting more features on top of that, which often require massive internal changes just for the sake of crossing an item from a checklist might make sense from the viewpoint of KDE users and KDE's marketing staff, but from a long-term engineering vision will only litter the code more and lead to more and more breakage over time. Most users won't notice that immediately but when they do it is already too late.

On how to do that better I really have to compliment the developers of Gnome's Mutter and wlroots.

Especially Mutter's Wayland session was in a bad state with some fundamental problems due to its history just few years ago. But they committed to a very forward-thinking stance, ignoring the initial bad reception and not being tempted by immediate quick fixes that long-term would not hold up to the necessary standards. And nowadays Gnome Mutter's Wayland session is in way better shape. I want to highlight their transactional KMS project. This is a massive overhaul that is completely transparent to the common user, but enables the Mutter developers to build on a solid base in many ways in the future.

Still as said I have not tried KWin 5.20 myself and if the new features are important to you, give it a try and check for yourself if your experience confirms my concerns or if you are happy with what was added. Switching from KWin to KWinFT or the other way around is easy after all.

How to Get the KWinFT Projects

If you self-compile KWinFT it is very easy to switch from KWin to KWinFT. Just compile KWinFT to your system prefix. If you want more comfort through distribution packages you have to choose your distribution carefully.

Currently only Manjaro provides KWinFT packages officially. You can install all KWinFT projects on Manjaro easily through the packages with the same names.

Manjaro also offers git-variants of these packages allowing you to run KWinFT projects directly from master branch. This way you can participate in its development directly or give feedback to latest changes.

If you run Arch Linux you can install all KWinFT projects from the AUR. The release packages are not yet updated to 5.20 but I assume this happens pretty soon. They have a bit weird naming scheme: there are kwinft, wrapland-kwinft, disman-kwinft and kdisplay-kwinft. Of these packages git-variants are available too but they follow the better naming scheme without a kwinft suffix. So for example the git package for disman-kwinft is just called disman-git. Naming nitpicks aside huge thanks to the maintainers of these packages: abelian424 and Christoph (haagch).

A special place in my heart was conquered not long ago by Fedora. I switched over to it from KDE Neon due to problems on the latest update and the often outdated packages and I am amazed by Fedora's technical versed and overall professional vision.

To install KWinFT projects on Fedora with its exceptional package manager DNF you can make use of this copr repository that includes their release versions. The packages are already updated to 5.20. Thanks to zawertun for providing these packages!

Fedora's KDE SIG group also took interest in the KWinFT projects and setup a preliminary copr for them. One of their packagers contacted me after the Beta release and I hope that I can help them to get it fully setup soon. I think Fedora's philosophy of pushing the Linux ecosystem by providing most recent packages and betting on emerging technologies will harmonize very well with the goals of the KWinFT project.