I love the plasma panel's look. They are a work of art. But I was wondering, is it possible to soup up the plasma panel to support more radical functionality? For instance, setting transparency on individual panels? Allowing panels to use alternate background images (or, like e17 shelves, assign different plasma themes to individual panels)? or maybe even taking on OS X with some cool zoom and bouncing effects? Maybe the KDE4 Plasma Panel could become a "real" competitor to the Mac dock. I am not a huge fan of eye candy (I switch between KDE4 (NOT 3.5!), Fluxbox and IceWM), but the fact is most people seem to.

Just wondering what others might think.

zak89 wrote:... assign different plasma themes to individual panels ...

This should be possible in KDE 4.2, which will be released in the beginning of the next year.

I don't know about individual panels, but you'll be able to use different themes for different types of widgets.

'Andrew Lake introduces a new configuration tool, "Desktop Theme Details"':
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2008-09-28/

msoeken wrote:

zak89 wrote:... assign different plasma themes to individual panels ...

This should be possible in KDE 4.2, which will be released in the beginning of the next year.

Would this solve the problem/request I posted here?

I mean, basically you could have two identical themes, but both with different colour schemes just for the font colouring part or widgets. If that's currently possible in the 4.2 trunk that would be great!