Review Request: Support for transparent panel without composition

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 30 March 2009, David Nolden wrote:
> Who cares how future devices will be? Who cares how future drivers will be?
> We are already working on KDE 4.3, something that is called "stable" for
> public use, right now! Why doesn't even a single plasma developer seem to
> care how current or even past devices work?

David, i've really tried to be patient with the hyperbole. i've reached my 
limits here, though.

we have spent a lot of time making things work on current and past devices. 
many current devices do work just swimmingly with kwin doing compositing, and 
those that don't get an attractive interface as well.

> Do you expect everyone to dump
> his computer just to get a nice looking Desktop?

to get the best looking desktop? yes, i do expect people to have hardware that 
can provide it. now, it might take people 2 years, 5 years or even 10 years. i 
don't expect my computer from 1999 to do much to impress me graphically or 
computing wise. that's just life and reality.

it's why we have degradation paths in kwin, plasma, libplasma, etc. that allow 
us to provide an attractive and usable desktop on older/smaller/not well 
supported hardware. we know this because some of us have actually used it on 
older machines for extended periods of time.

> Or are you planning to
> position plasma as a desktop-shell only for new computers, aka. Vista for
> Linux?

that's a red card.

as of now, the discussion concerning this patch is done, and the patch is not 
accepted, though we appreciate the attempt.

so let's all move move on to things that we agree can be improved, e.g. using 
a colour from the colour scheme for the PanelView background in the non-
compositing case.

-- 
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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