The next weekly KDE development report has been published, presenting changes for the KDE Plasma 6.7 branch, which is expected to be released in June. The KDE Plasma 6.7 branch is in soft freeze. Among the changes adopted this week:
- KWin optimizations have been introduced to improve performance and energy efficiency in programs that render using the CPU. Optimization note in most KDE programs and in applications that use QtWidgets (QtWidgets uses the CPU for rendering, while QtQuick uses GPU acceleration). For example, when working in KDevelop, the pointer now always moves smoothly, and the CPU load when scrolling has decreased from 80-90% to 20%.
- In KWin heuristics have been added that determine the advisability of using direct scan-out to improve performance and reducing energy consumption when opening windows to full screen.
- It was decided to include a new style engine Union in KDE Plasma 6.7, but it will not be clear yet whether it is enabled by default or will remain in the form of an option enabled in the settings. Union provides a unified styling system that allows to use different application styling technologies available in KDE.
The engine consists of three layers: input, intermediate and output. The input layer is implemented through plug-ins that parse input style file formats and convert them into an abstract description for rendering. The middle layer is designed as a library that describes the data model and methods for applying styles to each element. The output layer contains plugins for converting the generic style generated by the middleware into rendering commands specific to a particular graphics stack. For example, themes in SVG or CSS format can be used as an input format, and styles for QtQuick or Qt Widgets can be generated as an output.