Oxygen-drawn shadows are completely unrealistic. While they help to differentiate borderless windows, they do not make windows appear to "float" over their background. Compare these with OS X shadows which are much more realistic (albeit a bit large). Likewise with the latest shadows in Ubuntu 11.04.

Are there ways to get realistic shadows in KDE?

You can configure the shadows used in systemsettings -> Desktop Effects -> All Effects, click the configure button next to the Shadow effect.
Also, different KWin decorations (systemsettings -> Workplace Appearance -> Window Decorations) may use different shadow settings, which can be configured via the Configure Decoration button in that control panel.

Thanks, but I'm aware of both of these things. By default Oxygen draws the window decoration shadows, not the shadows whose settings are configurable in the Desktop Effects settings (which I guess are drawn by KWin?) Those appear to control only menu and like shadows. What's funny is that menu shadows are drawn more realistically than the oxygen ones, if you ask me.

Tweaking the oxygen shadows helps a little bit, e.g. by adding a black glow. But it doesn't help much. They still look awfully unrealistic, and in comparison with OS X and Ubuntu Unity shadows they look downright ridiculous. This is really the only aesthetic aspect of KDE that is serious lacking.

molecule-eye wrote:Thanks, but I'm aware of both of these things. By default Oxygen draws the window decoration shadows, not the shadows whose settings are configurable in the Desktop Effects settings (which I guess are drawn by KWin?) Those appear to control only menu and like shadows. What's funny is that menu shadows are drawn more realistically than the oxygen ones, if you ask me.

Just to make things clear: AFAIK Oxygen doesn't draw any thing at all. It's nothing but a collection of themes. The menus are drawn by Qt and the shadows around windows are drawn by Kwin.

You are right that the 'shadow' settings in desktop effects doesn't change the shadows drawn by Kwin. That is IMO a bug since the discription says "draw shadows under windows". I can't find a settings to change the shadows drawn by Kwin tough which is what you need.

Also I don't agree with you that the window shadows in Unity are prettier. I find them way too large and I don't think they give you a realistic effect of window floating above the desktop. That's just my opinion though, and I think there sould be a configurations option for it.

I said that oxygen draws the shadows because the configuration options for window shadows are contained in the oxygen-settings menu which you can also get to though system settings -> workspace appearance -> configure decorations (I think--I'm not on my KDE system at the moment). But you're right: these are drawn by the kwin compositor. I also agree that it is extremely confusing to list the shadow option in the effects menu the way it is, but that's a different story.

Even if the Unity shadows are too big (you can reduce their size with a simple "hack"), they're still far more realistic than kwin's.

In oxygen-settings you can change it so oxygen uses kwin shadows instead of its own shadows.

I forgot about that. In any case, the Desktop Effects shadows look worse!

sounds to me like there needs to be a cleanup of the shadows settings, since both KWin and the window decorations each have their own settings for drawing shadows. IMO, shadow settings are a global option which should be consolidated to one place (desktop effects?) where they can be configured to act like either the "real shadows" (shadow is dark gray and offset from the window, perhaps with z-index based sizes - e.g. idea brainstorm.php#idea87001_page1), or the "active glow" (shadow is active border/highlight color, centered under window, only focused window).