People, do calm down.

We...or I hope we, but I'll go with the royal version of We...understand.

I personally do not understand what is difficult about such a thing, and I would challenge you if it had not already been done and lessons learnt. But you have, so I won't, so I trust you when you say 'No'.

All I ask is that people think for a moment when doing such special effects, think particularly about what would be the lowest resource using way possible; after all, you'd like as many people as possible to enjoy the effects, right?

I would ask everyone else to trust the devs, as 4.3 has shown us, they do know what they are doing, after all.

I don't like the fake transparency of Gnome, Kicker or Fluxbox, and I'm sure-as-hell glad that someone gutsied-up and said, "No." It's about time.

Fake transparency is not the best thing, but it's ways batter than no tranparency.

kde4 offers "real" or "no transparency at all" instead of "real" and "fake". that's bad.

I myself prefer not to have fake transparency. Why? My choice. But I believe that my choice shouldn't matter in the end as I, just like many others, am a spectator/user. I can put my opinions, but I choose not to impose them.

The point is, as it is clear that it will *not* be implemented, I really don't see the point in posting the same rant over and over again. Developers are volunteers, and we should realize that. If you want it so badly, I suggest that you make an effort and do it yourself for personal use.

Just my two cents, strictly unofficial

Well, that's OK if compositing would work reliably, but that is not the case.

Intel & nvidia graphic cards work most of the time.
ATI cards do not work, neither with ati proprietary drivers nor radeon/radeonhd.

"do not work" means kde 4.3 starts up with a white screen and a mouse cursor. after a while the screen becomes dark gray and a black blended area where the panel schould be. ANY other DE works fine, including kde3.5. xfce works fine and any kde4 app started under xfce works fine, too. It seams that sometimes comosition wworks, but DRI does not - and that KDE4 cannot handle that.

ATI does not work for you, it works for a great many other people. But whatever the case, it is the opinion of KDE devs that they should not be implementing lots of hard-to-maintain hacks to work around temporary driver issues.

Hi ! (sorry for my bad english)

no fake transparency, ok why not.

but, I use xinerama (with three screens) and, in my systray, I have got a black background under some icons. it's possible to have got a same background that my panel ?



it's possible to make something for white backgroupd under superkaramba them ?



all without desktop effects of course.

note : I use xinerama because XGL is dead. xrandr don't see my second video card and my thrid screen. twinview it's only for two screens. and I can't activate the desktop effects...

that ATI driver problem will eventualy be solved with mesa 7.2 and radeon/radeonhd, I think I can wait for it. Looks just like a bad time to test things on debian testing, I think. well, time will tell

samhain wrote:Fake transparency is not the best thing, but it's ways batter than no transparency.

There is another reason for that.
Simply that Flash streaming is not compatible with compositing without using 100% of CPU.
=> Flash Uses The GPU
=> Pushing Technology onto the User
=> Transparency without composition
=> Support for transparent panel without composition

Switching compositing on/off to read Flash streaming is not a fair solution.

So, if developers do not like the "fake" transparency, it should not be that difficult to explain in detail how to do it, in order to get at least the quality level of KDE3.5 panel without compositing activated.

I also could live without any special Desktop effects, and with a fake transparency panel.

Panel background was so easy to manage in KDE3.

Now, it seems that panel background of oxygen theme without compositing is this one:
/usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/oxygen/opaque/widgets/panel-background.svgz

The problem is that editing svg is more complex than editing png.

Does somebody know how to make panel-background.svgz transparent ?

i would open it in karbon and play with the transparency

not tried though

(and if allready did - i'd on the way get rid of all that round corners too)

try to open them in karbon. those of air theme contain a lot of invisible parts which i dont know what to do with

"not tried though"

You should. If you understand svg, you are welcome to explain how to make a simple transparent file for the taskbar.
I wonder why it is now so complex compared to KDE3.

You could always read the documentation...

You should also read it to estimate if it is fitting the question.
If you think so, please tell us how to make a translucent panel-background.svgz in less than one minute.

If you say you can't, that means that this doc is made for developers, and not for users who expect to modify a taskbar as easily than with KDE3.
Hope that KDE4 is more made for users than for developers.