composite and window translucency/shadow

[Anders Storsveen]

I found one serious defect with the transparency/shadow effect in kde!
if you use a shadow in conjunction with the transparency you will get a
darker transparancy, because apparently the shadow is a black
semi-transparent copy of the window which is just a little bigger than
the original window! this is really stupid, and the shadow should only
be drawn outside the window, and not behind it! It makes everything look
gray and dull! And I want to use both...
Also it looks like shadows are much more cpu intensive than transparancy
and effects, maybe limiting the drawing to only around the window, like
a new border would help that along also!

Also another thing is that, making the shadows bigger than about 2-3
just washes them out... they get so thinly shadowed that they dissapear
which isn't what I would want. I would like to have a bigger shadow on
my active windows to give the effect of it being higher above the
desktop, and inactive ones being lower... however, like this it seems
that the shadow gets removed when I get them active. What could be done
is add another option to control shadow "filling" to choose how dark it
should be, so when upping the size you also up the degree of darkness or
filling. Or another algorithm that compensates for it automatically, so
what you get is actually a larger shadow! ;)

On a positive note though, it works really great now with the new
drivers! The only technical problems I have with them is that X just
quits if I press view on a "new message" bubble in kopete, it has been
like this for a while ( with old drivers too), and the second is that
sometimes when I apply changes to the Translucency tab it locks up.
Other than that stability has greatly improved!
Hope someone can do something about this! other than that it's getting
along great! ;)
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.