Kwin-lowlatency
Version: 5.15.5 Web: https://github. com/tildearrow/kwin-lowlatency
This Hotpick will probably be a reason to rejoice for all KDE Plasma users who are not (quite) happy with the performance of Kwin, Plasma’s window manager. In fact, Kwin in its current state is already great and stable, but given the fact that it incorporates sophisticated code for GPU acceleration and some mind-blowing visual effects, your mileage may vary.
Kwin-lowlatency is a fork of the upstream Kwin project with extra patches designed to improve responsiveness, remove unwanted latencies and eliminate Vsync-related issues such as tearing. This pick is also very hot: at the time of writing it supports only the latest two versions of Plasma, 5.14. and 5.15, and therefore is targeted at those who run bleedingedge Plasma versions (think Arch, Tumbleweed and so on).
If you have a Linux box with a fresh Plasma version, give Kwin-lowlatency a try and see how it goes. The code takes a noticeable fraction of time to get compiled
using the convenient cmake-based approach (have a cup of tea in the meanwhile). Once you have the build, run sudo make install and do a logout/login sequence. Kwin-lowlatency replaces the stock Kwin version and therefore you’ll be using the new version with no extra effort.
Users of Plasma 5.15 and onward will notice the updated section under System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor, with some sweet extra tweaks that don’t exist for regular Kwin versions. Play some Opengl games or launch an HD video to see if it runs smoother than before. Kwin-lowlatency uses glxwaitvideosync instead of DRM Vblank, which implies better graphics performance regardless of your video driver.
The patches that make it possible are considered experimental and are therefore not included in the upstream project, but they already do a great job for many configurations. If something does go wrong, revert with sudo apt-get install --reinstall kwin-x11 .