Yesterday marked the milestone of KWin’s kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland code being split up. The Wayland and X11 code for the KWin compositor is now separate from each other but can be co-installable for systems wanting to support both X11 and Wayland environments.
KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii announced yesterday that the kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland split is complete as of this week. The code for these X11 and Wayland targets is now separate but co-installable. It’s up to the Linux distributions to decide whether to ship one or both of these KWin implementations.
KWin_Wayland is being treated as the de-facto “kwin”. KWin developers are planning to continue supporting the KWin X11 code until the Plasma 7 major release. However, no new features are expected to be back-ported to the KWin X11 code and in effect the X11 code under KDE was already treated as an informal feature freeze.
More details on this KDE KWin Wayland and X11 code split via this mailing list post.
