Hi LXDE and Razor developers, back when Razor was still its own project (again congrats on seeing what you share and deciding to work together!) I had the idea of making KWin more attractive for non KDE Plasma based desktop environments. For our 4.10 release I provided a patch to get a stand-alone and trimmed down version of our window manager. I don't want to re-iterate myself, so just check the thread on the razor mailing list [1] :-)
In the meantime we had our 4.11 release and I recently rebased the patch to this branch. You can find it in [2]. This is our last release based on Qt 4 and by that probably also the last time I have to do this (we might split repos). And with that we can look into the future. We are currently working on the port to Qt 5 and KF 5 and it looks quite good already. Good enough that I feel confident to write to you. With KF 5 our dependencies go down significantly. Instead of a generic linkage to kdelibs we can now link just the few pieces we actually need. I started to document our current library dependency in [3]. As you can see it's not a lot more than one would expect from an X11 (and Wayland) window manager and compositor. And I have some ideas to make KWin even more attractive. I want to advice distributions to split KWin into three packages: * KWin core * KWin Plasma Desktop Integration * KWin configuration modules The idea is that KWin core contains the bare window manager and compositor. This should only depend on KF 5 tier 1 and tier 2 libraries. This is completely without UI (except window decorations but those are plugins anyway). All our UI is done in QML currently using Plasma components. That will probably not change for our next version - after all we have enough porting to do ;-) But hardly any of the QML files are hard coded. Most are loaded through a plugin mechanism at runtime which allows to easily replace them. And this allows to just move all of them into an "integration" package and have another integration package for other desktop environments. The third part are our config modules. KWin doesn't have configuration interfaces built in but uses out-of-process UIs. Those configuration modules just modify our config file and send a DBus signal to inform all running KWin instances to reload the config. With this mechanism it's again not very difficult to provide config interfaces more specific to a desktop environment and also to provide a "trimmed down" config. That's what we do for our Plasma Active shell: KWin doesn't have any configuration interfaces there as the chance to destroy it due to bad settings is too high. If you have any specific questions or suggestions on what we should do to have a well integrated KWin into LXDE/Razor please let me know. At the moment it's the best time to draft plans for the future before too much adjustments have been done. Please also provide some feedback on the idea of splitting KWin into several packages. It's the first time that I'm sharing this idea. Oh and just as a reminder: if you need any X11 specific Qt code please check what we have. Especially KWindowSystems might provide quite some nice and useful additions. Also things like our libtaskmanager might be useful. Getting X right can be quite annoying and some parts of our code base have 15 years of fighting X experience ;-) The code is there ready to be used. Best Regards Martin Gräßlin KWin maintainer [1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/razor-qt/5LI_BxBewPU/discussion [2] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=clones%2Fkde-workspace%2Fgraesslin%2Fkde-workspace.git&a=commit&h=2d031dfda7581476857bf92df7da28f5f35f8e03 [3] https://community.kde.org/KWin/Dependencies
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