Interesting news came from the KDE camp. The KWin team has officially split the project into two parts: KWin X11 and KWin Wayland. According to an announcement to the KDE’s mailing list, these split components are now hosted at two distinct repositories:
This change marks a shift in how desktop environments can be deployed on Linux, as KWin X11 and KWin Wayland are now fully co-installable without any direct conflicts.
Consequently, when KDE Plasma 6.4 is released (scheduled for June 12), individual Linux distributions can opt to include only KWin Wayland or ship both KWin X11 and KWin Wayland, depending on their default display protocol and user preferences.
Moreover, it is worth noting that KWin Wayland is now “de-facto” KWin moving forward, meaning users and distros will likely continue to see it simply packaged as “kwin.” While the naming decision ultimately lies with each distro, the KDE team recommends that any “kwin” package now be recognized as “kwin_wayland,” reflecting the project’s focus on Wayland.
Another important announcement is that KWin X11 will remain under maintenance until KDE Plasma 7, for which there is no scheduled roadmap yet, but it’s likely to happen next year. Although it is mostly feature-frozen—per a longstanding freeze highlighted in an earlier blog post—bug fixes will still land there.
According to the announcement, developers should commit new fixes to KWin Wayland first and then backport them to KWin X11. Finally, keep in mind that the KWin X11 codebase still retains some Wayland traces, particularly around testing.
For more information, refer to the KDE mailing list. The project is expected to officially announce this change in a dedicated blog post shortly.
