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"The latest Plasma release dropped a few desktop effects: the cube family, CoverSwitch and FlipSwitch. All of those effects were written back in 2008, the early days of KDE 4.x and the early days of desktop effects in KWin. The effects were implemented by me and when Vlad asked about removing them I saw the need for this and supported this step for technical reasons. With this blog post I want to share a little bit of why it was needed to remove them and why this means that they can come back in better ways than ever before."

"To really understand this we need to time travel back to 2008 and the years before when desktop effects were introduced. This can help to understand how the hardware architecture changed and how that influenced design decisions in the effects API which are nowadays problematic. First of all CPUs. The Intel Core 2 Duo architecture was launched in 2006 as the brand new thing which had multiple (namely 2) cores which slowly replaced the NetBurst architecture which dominated Desktop computing for the beginning of that decade."

"Also for developers these multi-core systems were a new thing. And that meant lots of software written before was single threaded. Especially KWin at that time was single threaded as it also depended on libraries which were not really thread safe such as the Xlib library and back at that time even OpenGL. Even years later when Qt introduced the threaded rendering in Qt 5 on many Mesa drivers this was disabled due to thread safety issues. Nobody would have thought of having any benefit of a threaded compositing approach back in 2007 with the state of hardware and the available libraries. Thread libraries were of course already available such as QtConcurrent or ThreadWeaver, but not of a useful use in KWin. This means the API written back then did not support ideas like doing rendering on a second thread or even rendering for each screen in a thread."

"KWin’s compositing pipeline was written for OpenGL 1.4 which was the only supported version in the Mesa stack. KWin supported shaders written in OpenGL Shading Language which replaced parts of the fixed functionality pipeline in OpenGL 1.4 and emulated the fixed functionality pipeline. This was only supported on the proprietary NVIDIA driver. OpenGL 3 was released in 2008, but it was years till it became available on the Linux desktop (according to Wikipedia in 2012)."

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State of CPU in 2008

State of OpenGL in 2008

State of multi screen support

State of Alt+Tab

How Alt+Tab evolved