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A PHP Dev Just Solved a 20+ Year-Old KDE Plasma Problem No One Else Would (itsfoss.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Back in 2005, a bug report was filed by Kjetil Kjernsmo, then running KDE 3.3.2 on Debian Stable. He wanted the ability to have each connected screen show a different virtual desktop independently, rather than having all displays switch as one unit.

Over the years, over 15 duplicate reports piled onto the original as more people ran into the same wall. And that's not a surprise, because multi-monitor setups have become increasingly common.

The technical reason why this issue stayed open this long comes down to X11. Implementing it there would have required violating the EWMH specification, which has no concept of multiple virtual desktops being active at the same time.

The KWin maintainer Martin Flöser had said as much in 2013, effectively ruling it out for the entire KDE 4.x series. The only realistic path was through Wayland, and that path needed someone willing to actually walk it.

Someone finally did. The feature has now landed in KWin's master branch and is set for a Plasma 6.7 introduction.

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[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 2 hours ago

It's more that compositors (picom, xcompmgr) and window managers are extremely complex, and adding that feature in could have much larger impacts than just the functionality itself, e.g. security context implications, task scheduling, rendering pipeline issues, etc. Wayland actually combines the compositor and WM, so it's more readily extensible than X11.