The Xrender backend was added at the time when OpenGL drivers were not
particularly stable. Nowadays though, it's a totally different situation.
The OpenGL render backend has been the default one for many years. It's
quite stable, and it allows implementing many advanced features that
other render backends don't.
Many features are not tested with it during the development cycle; the
only time when it is noticed is when changes in other parts of kwin break
the build in the xrender backend. Effectively, the xrender backend is
unmaintained nowadays.
Given that the xrender backend is effectively unmaintained and our focus
being shifted towards wayland, this change drops the xrender backend in
favor of the opengl backend.
Besides being de-facto unmaintained, another issue is that QtQuick does
not support and most likely will never support the Xrender API. This
poses a problem as we want thumbnail items to be natively integrated in
the qtquick scene graph.
Currently, dealing with sub-surfaces is very difficult due to the scene
design being heavily influenced by X11 requirements.
The goal of this change is to re-work scene abstractions to make improving
the wayland support easier.
The Item class is based on the QQuickItem class. My hope is that one day
we will be able to transition to QtQuick for painting scene, but in
meanwhile it makes more sense to have a minimalistic internal item class.
The WindowItem class represents a window. The SurfaceItem class represents
the contents of either an X11, or a Wayland, or an internal surface. The
DecorationItem and the ShadowItem class represent the server-side deco and
drop-shadow, respectively.
At the moment, the SurfaceItem is bound to the scene window, but the long
term plan is to break that connection so we could re-use the SurfaceItem
for things such as software cursors and drag-and-drop additional icons.
One of the responsibilities of the Item is to schedule repaints as needed.
Ideally, there shouldn't be any addRepaint() calls in the core code. The
Item class schedules repaints on geometry updates. In the future, it also
has to request an update if its opacity or visibility changes.
Once in a while, we receive complaints from other fellow KDE developers
about the file organization of kwin. This change addresses some of those
complaints by moving all of source code in a separate directory, src/,
thus making the project structure more traditional. Things such as tests
are kept in their own toplevel directories.
This change may wreak havoc on merge requests that add new files to kwin,
but if a patch modifies an already existing file, git should be smart
enough to figure out that the file has been relocated.
We may potentially split the src/ directory further to make navigating
the source code easier, but hopefully this is good enough already.
