Review Request: Support for transparent panel without composition

Mon Mar 30 20:27:19 CEST 2009

> On 2009-03-30 08:33:22, Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
> > Keeping this all within the desktop shell is a clear improvement over 'contaminating' libplasma, though I'm still not a big fan of supporting fake transparency. Realize, that with somewhat decent drivers, real transparency through compositing is most likely faster then fake transparency. It's designed for that sort of thing, just like moving a window in front of another window is also faster with compositing on, because the other window doesn't continuously need to repaint. Of course compositing had it's problem, which used to make compositing quite slower in practice, but nowadays, I can't really say I can notice any performance difference between using compositing and not, except a slight increase in memory usage, and a slightly warmer gfx card. So the 'snappy desktop' argument is not really valid imo. The only reason why you would want fake transparency is old hardware (not even low end, a lot of modern low end hardware handles compositing just fine) and/or crappy drivers. The crappy drivers part: one of the things I like about plasma is that it doesn't hack around problems in the software stack below it, it exposes those problems, and forces the stack below to improve, which benefits much more then just plasma. So that keeps people with old hardware as primary target for this patch. And really: if you really care about eye candy, why not spend 20 bucks on a new low end gfx card that handles compositing smoothly?
> > It also doesn't really decrease the amount of work that goes inside creating a theme significantly, because there's still quite some stuff that NEEDS an opaque version, like the dialog graphics (Plasma::Dialogs usually appear in front of other windows, so using fake transparency would be a really bad idea there), and extender items (needed for creating the pixmap used while dragging an item around). And having a fake transparent panel combined with a opaque plasma dialog connected to it would look..... a bit odd imo.
> > 
> > So long story short I personally think the advantages are too few to be worth introducing this hack into plasma. But if enough people think otherwise, feel free to ignore my opinion...
> 
> David Nolden wrote:
>     I have a geforce 9600GT, had a 7600GT before, am using the newest nvidia drivers. This is probably the best supported and close to the fastest hardware available for linux composition, still under high workloads(4 times make, 1 kdevelop parsing, 1 amarok), it feels extremely sluggish, and even without that workload it _always_ lags a few milliseconds. To you those milliseconds might not matter, but to me they do.
>     
>     Also, games are much slower just when enabling the composition in the xorg.conf.
>     
>     The only other hardware that right now supports composition in an acceptable way is probably the intel drivers, but those cards are usually also to slow to fire a full composited 3200x1200 Desktop. My old intel notebook had even too slow graphics to composite a 1024x768 Desktop in an even remotely acceptable way.
>     
>     I didn't even want to discuss about these issues, the key point is: There is _many_ reasons not to use composition, and many people who cannot use it. There probably always will be.
>     
>     Also, think for example about the KDE feature that shuts off composition when power is very low. How unbelievable ugly is it right now, when for example the glassified theme is used, and it shuts the composition off for you?
>     
>     The key point: Just because composition works for you does not mean it works for everyone. Also, you shouldn't tell people they need to buy new hardware, just so they can do something that there hardware is perfectly capable of(That is _that other OS_ style ;-)
> 
> David Nolden wrote:
>     Btw. with that patch, the panel is rendered in exactly the same way as a plasmoid, so if you think the performance is problematic, then you should equally worry about those
> 
> Rob Scheepmaker wrote:
>     Which nvidia driver version are you using? 180.35 work really well with my 8400 GS. I'm not saying there are no problems with compositing at all at the moment, there are people that have performance issues. But i'd rather see those issues solved in the stack below us. See for example the changelogs of the nvidia drivers: a lot of performance issues that KDE experienced with KDE 4, have been addressed by the nvidia developers, something that would never have happened, if we've worked around those problems in the first place. One of the design principles of plasma is to do things right, which often means offering less eyecandy to the composite-less. Your view that there will always be reasons not to use compositing is rather pessimistic imo.
>     And about disabling compositing when power saving.... this is a valid use case but have you seen what for example the Plasma::Dialog looks like with glassified theme and compositing disabled? Just pop up the calendar and see what I mean. This just can't be changed. Themes like glassified are just not made to look very good without compositing. Fortunately there are themes that do look good without compositing.

Exactly that version. I'm not saying it doesn't work good, But it still works a lot better without composition, and I'm not willing to get my usability significantly reduced just to get transparent krunner windows. The important stuff like a nicely looking desktop is also achievable without composition, and that's why I'm here. Actually I'm one of the relatively lucky guys: My Hardware _would_ do composition in a nearly acceptable way. But I'm also raising the voice for those who can not use composition, which probably is more then 50%
 of all current linux users. As I said, KDE4 is not a future technology, it's also a technology that is ment to be used _now_, so it has to work _now_. I think it's good that KDE pushes the technology, but I don't like that it happens by leaving users behind.

Another thing:
Consider a random new linux user, who doesn't have composition, doesn't know what it is, and doesn't even care. Now he tries to get a nicer plasma theme than aya, uses gethotnewstuff, and sees 18 out of 20 themes he downloads look like total crap. What an impression does that make?

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.

For example, either a user-configurable non-black solid color, the wallpaper, or another generic theme background pattern could be used as background, instead of black. Together with better automatic theme mask detection, this would make _all_ plasma themes look good even without composition.

- David

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On 2009-03-30 06:37:48, David Nolden wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/472/
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> 
> (Updated 2009-03-30 06:37:48)
> 
> 
> Review request for Plasma.
> 
> 
> Summary
> -------
> 
> Many people can not, or do not want to use composition. A semi-transparent panel highly increases the appeal of a Desktop, and there currently is only very few plasma themes available that have a nice-looking panel without transparency enabled.
> 
> All other major linux Desktop-Environments support transparent panels without composition(KDE 3.x, GNOME, and others), and since usually the only thing that needs to be visible through the panel is the Desktop itself, using a composition-less approach does not have much disadvantage here.
> 
> Here's I'm proposing a patch to achieve  this in a relatively clean way: The panel is painted and updated as if it was a plasmoid on the Desktop itself, grabbing the painted area plasma-internally directly from the  underlying desktop-view. The corresponding area of the panel is updated whenever the desktop is repainted, which means that animated plasmoids partially hidden under the panel, animations like the desktop-fading, moving plasmoids partially under the panel, etc. "just work".
> 
> Result: A nice looking panel for everyone, less work for theme designers. Please don't leave those behind who don't want or can not use desktop composition!
> 
> (Note: If you try this out, it doesn't work with all themes, since some themes seem to have no alpha-information in the non-composition case).
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/containments/panel/panel.h 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/containments/panel/panel.cpp 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/desktopview.h 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/desktopview.cpp 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/panelview.h 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/panelview.cpp 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/plasmaapp.h 940781 
>   trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/plasmaapp.cpp 940781 
> 
> Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/472/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
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> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David
> 
>