multiple wallpapers by default

[Lubos Lunak]

On Friday 21 of May 2004 18:28, Sean O'Dubhghaill wrote:
> After some discussion on kde-usability and being prodded by Henrique Pinto
> I'm posting this here.
>
> Peter Postmus offered the best explanation on why this is a plus for
> usability
[snip]
>
> The general conclusion on kde-usability was that a selection of wallpapers
> from: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=10365 would be the
> best to use. Such as bc_blue.jpg, bc_gray.jpg, bc_green.jpg and
> bc_fire.jpg.
>
> You can check out the usability thread here:
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&m=108410867708086&w=2
>
> The main drawback that was rasied was about performance, I'm running a
> 800mhz G3 ibook here any there is a slight delay between changing desktops
> and the wallpaper changing which increases if the wallpaper is scaled
> instead of just centered. Can anyone with a slower machine report on what
> it feels like? Maybe this could be turned off on slower machines using the
> desktop settings wizard eyecandy-o-meter (which i think turns desktop
> wallpapers of anyway on slow machines).

 KDesktop uses a cache for the rendered backgrounds, and you can sets its size 
in the advanced background settings. That'd solve the CPU performance 
problem, at the expense of memory usage of course. With my 1400*1050/16bpp, 
every cached background should cost about 3MiB memory (this BTW also means 
that for anybody using better than 1024*768/16bpp the default cache size is 
useless).

 Note that single color, vertical/horizontal gradients and tile (not centered) 
should be fast to paint and with low (or none at all) memory usage.

> PS please CC me as i'm not on this list, thank you

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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