Today we expect the release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces in version 4.7 which is the first release including an OpenGL ES 2.0/EGL backend in KWin. This does not only allow us to run KWin on OpenGL ES powered devices (I am particular looking forward to see KWin on Tegra 2 devices), but also gives us a much better compositing experience on the desktop systems. Thanks to the work on OpenGL ES 2.0 our default compositing backend is now OpenGL 2.x based instead of OpenGL 1.x as it was till 4.6.

I want to thank all users who tested our beta version and release candidates and ensured by that a regression free update. I am very glad on how smooth this major transition of the compositor seems to work according to the very low number of bug reports in this cycle.

On Mesa enabled desktop systems there is also the possibility to go a step further and leave GLX completely behind by compiling KWin for OpenGL ES/EGL only. My personal experience is that it is often a much better experience to use the OpenGL ES build. If you compile KWin from sources ensure that the OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL development libraries are around and enable the CMake option “KWIN_BUILD_WITH_OPENGLES”. If everything is setup correctly, CMake will tell you “Compiling KWin for mobile”.

Of course compiling from sources is not what most of our users do, so it needs distro help. Thanks to the awesome Kubuntu crew there will be a kwin_gles package available in Kubuntu 11.10. So users can switch to use this package.

But that’s still not perfect as users need to know that there is a better GLES variant. So today I pushed a change to master to build KWin twice: once with OpenGL and once with OpenGL ES. Thanks to our CMake Gods for all the help on getting this done :-). Now if OpenGL ES is available at buildtime a “kwin_gles” binary is compiled and can be used just like “kwin”. For all users of masters, do a git pull, recompile and run: kwin_gles –replace & and enjoy.

And that’s also just an intermediate step. Our GSoC student Arthur is currently working in close collaboration with me on decoupling our compositor from the window manager so that we can build just the compositor once with OpenGL and once with OpenGL ES. We will then put the compositor into a plugin and do a runtime check whether OpenGL ES is working and if it is we will load the OpenGL ES compositor. So if everything works fine, in 4.8 we will be able to offer and default to OpenGL ES 2.0 for most of our users.