I think most of us are aware that compositors use multiple planes to render our user interfaces, and in the case of KDE’s Kwin specifically, they use two planes – one for the user interface, and one specifically for the mouse cursor. Kwin developer Xaver Hugl has been working on changing Kwin to use more than just two planes, and it turns out this delivers some considerable power use reductions and thus battery life improvements.
So, when can you use these changes and test them?
Due to various driver issues when trying to use overlays, like slow atomic tests on AMD as well as display freezes on some AMD and NVidia GPUs, this feature is still off by default.
However, if you want to experiment anyways or attempt to fix the drivers, starting from Plasma 6.5, you can set the KWIN_USE_OVERLAYS environment variable to enable the feature anyways. If you test it, please report your findings! If there’s problems in the drivers, we’d like to know and have bug reports for the GPU vendors of course, but also if things work well that would be nice to hear.
↫ Xaver Hugl
Leave it to Linux graphics-related developers to uncover driver bugs in graphics drivers.
Wouldn’t this also potentially improve RDP’s remote desktop?
One thing I’d really like to see with software based KVM systems like Barrier/Input-Leap would be a window by window remote rendering. Imagine if you could have a Linux machine, next to a macOS machine, and drag windows between them, but each window is rendered on it’s own surface (similar to what VM platforms like Parallels does). This would be so cool!
CaptainN-,
I’m not sure if anyone has done it exactly as you are saying, but X11 would make it pretty easy to do. Xpra is a project that almost does what you want, disconnecting running applications and reconnecting them under various operating systems.
https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/wiki/Platforms
Killing X11. only to call for reinventing network transparency is kind of funny 🙂
“Killing X11. only to call for reinventing network transparency is kind of funny”
Ahh but but security… Nah you are right funnier than hell topped off by them GNOME clowns still not having anywhere near feature parity in the new shinny but by now almost two decade old Wayland, the biggest laugh of them all, the joke is on all of us.