Review Request: Support for transparent panel without composition

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 30 March 2009, David Nolden wrote:

> Just by the way I think we need to find a way to make composition-centric
> themes also look good without composition, because it seems like 
> theme-designers just don't care about that case, and it's also quite a
> burden to them. They should just supply masks for non-composition, and that
> should be it.

we don't actually need masks for most of these things. the outer border of the 
painted panel areas is good enough usually, and we even have a method to grab 
those already in plasma.

> either a user-configurable non-black solid color, the wallpaper, or another
> generic theme background pattern could be used as background, instead of
> black.

"the wallpaper" doesn't actually have much meaning in plasma. there's "the 
wallpaper, if any, of the current Containment associated with the current 
DesktopView that happens to have the same screen() value as the other object, 
such as a PanelView". so that's probably not what we want.

user configurable seems overkill. we already have the colour scheme associated 
with each theme. we could pick, for instance, the window background colour 
from that color scheme and use that as the PanelView wash. that would at least 
get rid of the black. and for themes that adapt themselves to the user's 
colour scheme, such as Aya, that colour would actually be user configurable.

that's actually a patch set that would be an improvement over the current non-
compositing situation. :)

> I think it's good that KDE
> pushes the technology, but I don't like that it happens by leaving users
> behind.

fake translucent panels is not leaving anyone behind, nor does it make 
anything "not work". people continue to use plasma and it looks quite pretty 
without compositing. in fact, i'm running plasma without compositing right 
now, as i have been since the last Intel driver update (a month or two ago 
now?) where they completely botched performance. i'm quite happy with the look 
and feel of plasma even without compositing.

the fake translucency is a trivial feature in terms of user benefit but comes 
with a high cost to the code base. so the cost/benefit just doesn't work out. 
and that's simply the fact of the matter.

(btw, i'm one of the people primarily responsible for the fake translucency in 
kicker ... zack is the other.. both of us think it's a bad idea to repeat it 
in plasma. maybe that says something. :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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