When we started the compositing work in KWin the only way to initialize an OpenGL context was by using GLX. In fact GLX is even part of the OpenGL library on Linux. Being an X11 window manager and an X11 compositor it was not a big problem.

Years later we started the effort to get KWin using optionally OpenGL ES in addition to normal OpenGL. One of the differences is that OpenGL ES doesn’t use GLX, but rather EGL. So we gained code to setup compositing using EGL. But this was still a compile time switch and only supported together with using OpenGL ES. If I remember correctly the option to create on OpenGL context on top of EGL was not yet available in our drivers back then.

But there was a time when the FLOSS drivers started to support it and since the 4.10 release in beginning of 2013 we can provide a normal OpenGL context over EGL. This option was not really exposed and only bound to an environment variable. Very few users knew about it and this was also wanted. Using EGL was a good way to shoot yourself in the foot given that not all drivers support it and that we had much more testing on the GLX backend.

Now the situation has changed. With 5.x we expose EGL also through a config interface, but more importantly EGL is the only way to get OpenGL on Wayland. The assumption that every user is using GLX doesn’t hold any more. The assumption that we don’t need to spend so much time (as it’s only relevant in the reduced feature set of mobile devices) on the EGL backend is wrong. It must reach the same quality as the GLX backend, otherwise our Wayland experience suffers.

So this raises an important question: should we try targeting EGL as the default? In the past one of the main reasons to not even think about EGL as default is the reason that the NVIDIA driver didn’t support it. If we would have switched to EGL by default it would have meant dealing with the situation that EGL doesn’t work and we need to fall back to GLX. It would have complicated the startup significantly and would have resulted in our user base using different rendering paths.

Now this one road blocker seems to resolve itself. While I haven’t tested it yet, the latest NVIDIA beta driver supports OpenGL over EGL, so we should be able to have the majority of our user base on the same backend after all. Given that it is only a beta driver and the feature is marked as “experimental” it’s probably still some time till we can default to it.

Nevertheless it’s time to start thinking about it. I encourage NVIDIA users to give EGL now a try and to report issues. Also I encourage all other users to report issues they see with the EGL backend. If we get the EGL backend into a good state maybe 5.6 might be a good point in time to default to it and then start to slowly deprecate the GLX backend with the aim to get it removed in the distant future.