[kde-linux] KDE-4.10.1 - Pager sort of a mess

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>    I updated to KDE-4.10.1 last week when it became stable on Gentoo.
>> It's working but I find the new version of Pager not as useful as
>> previous versions. In this version, instead of making the current
>> desktop noticeably lighter in color, it seems I'm only getting a few
>> white pixels at the corners of the selected desktop. To me this isn't
>> visible on a 1920x1080 screen at an arm's length. I have to lean
>> forward and change focus to find out which one is active. Using the
>> older version I only had to glance to the bottom left and I'd see
>> which was selected very easily.
>>
>>    I wonder if anyone has found any settings that might make this more
>> readable for me? The Desktop Name & Number features don't help but
>> maybe there's something buried elsewhere I haven't found.
>
> Hi Mark, long time no see.
>

Yeah, I left gentoo-user after almost a decade of membership so I'm
not visibly around as much as I used to be. Still here using Gentoo
though. I doubt that will ever change. Good to see you also.

> As far as I can tell on my system, nothing has changed about the
> pager. The only time it's difficult to see which desktop is active is
> when I have no windows open on any of them, in that case one of them
> has a slight "glow" around the border but is otherwise
> indistinguishable. When windows are present, though, it's obvious. The
> current desktop then is almost white, while the others are a dark
> grey. I'm sure this is highly dependent on theme/wallpaper/etc. and
> probably some combinations result in worse contrast than others.
>
> I believe it uses the text color/inactive text color from your theme
> and uses gamma to darken/brighten the thumbnail desktop indicators. So
> I would try changing/adjusting/reapplying your theme, turn desktop
> effects off/on (if you use them), ensure your video driver is not
> doing anything funky that might mess with gamma rendering... I think
> I've read that KDE and Qt should all be compiled with the same version
> of GCC, so if you've upgraded your compiler lately maybe that has
> something to do with it.
>
> Good luck!

Humm, the way you describe your system is exactly the way mine used to
work. The pager element that represented the selected desktop was
noticeably whiter and very easy to see. Now the only thing I have is
at each corner there appear to be 2 or at most 3 white pixels sort of
highlighting the corner. The bulk of the pager area for that desktop
is unchanged whether selected or not. I have 6 desktops, 5 always have
apps on them. The app areas show as darker, but the bulk of the area
is unchanged.

Your comments about themes & wallpaper are almost certainly involved.
I hadn't looked at this issue on my laptop so I just fired it up. On
the laptop the whole Task Manager along the bottom has switch to
nearly transparent. I can hardly see it either. There's really just a
faint line along the top of it. On the laptop the pager blocks
representing each desktop are just faint outlines where the one that's
selected has a 1 pixel outline.

This is more messed up than I thought!

Certainly KDE has built with the newest installed compiler whereas I'm
unsure what Qt was built with. As the laptop is having troubles also
I'll kick off an emerge -e @world and see what it looks like later
this morning. Probably will take 90-120 minutes to rebuild all 1K
packages.

Thanks for the ideas and it's good to hear from you also!

Cheers,
Mark