Hello,

With the Holiday season approaching (too fast), I recently tried the good, old xsnow on my KDE 4.1.3 installation. No success - I assume plasma+the whole new way of doing things has made that one impossible.

Does anyone know if there is a Plasma/Plasmoid-version of xsnow available, that can make it snow on the KDE4 desktop? Is this the right forum to ask for one?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

This is the right forum, yes.
For 4.2 the background image part was changed to plugin based, so there possibly will be a way to add something like xsnow as plugin.

As i didn't use xsnow before, did you already try the snow effect from the kwin effect plugins? i don't know if that is similar.

If memory serves, with xsnow you would have snow fall and accumulate on panels, etc. From time to time Santa would fly over too. To me this sounds like something a KWin plugin could handle perfectly.

I tried the snow effect in kwin under KDE 4.1.3 without seeing any effect.
The neatness of xsnow is, just like JontheEchinda says, to have snow falling and accumulating on the windows, the occasional (and optional) christmas tree and Santa fly-by and similar effects. I believe that this goes beyound the scope of the currently existing snow function...
It's completely non-productive, and still quite nice to run around the Christmas holidays

Maybe KDE4 (e.g. its KWin) could have a native effect similar (and more modern) to what 'xsnow' does — that'd really rock!

Yalla-One wrote:I tried the snow effect in kwin under KDE 4.1.3 without seeing any effect.

Just to mention it, it needs to be toggled, use Meta+Ctrl+F12 for that, if it is activated.

hook wrote:Maybe KDE4 (e.g. its KWin) could have a native effect similar (and more modern) to what 'xsnow' does — that'd really rock!

And, sure enough, in KDE 4.2 there is (will be) included a Snow effect!

I love you guys! :star:

neverendingo wrote:

Yalla-One wrote:I tried the snow effect in kwin under KDE 4.1.3 without seeing any effect.

Just to mention it, it needs to be toggled, use Meta+Ctrl+F12 for that, if it is activated.

Yes, but it's not by far as elegant as xsnow: large ugly snow crystals that don't stay on top of your windows and widgets. And no Santa flying through the sky with his reindeer! (though I used to run xsnow -nosanta -notrees after Christmas)

The fun is limited... I'd prefer xsnow because the snow looks and behaves more like real snow and you can use it in scripts. I won't toggle snow by hand, it must just come on its own. For KDE3 I had a script that started xsnow on December 24. And a script that autostarted xpenguins on birthdays. This also isn't possible anymore

Any chance to see something like that for the kwin effect?

Also it was possible to use xsnow without compositing...

Please bring back the possibility to use applications like xsnow and xpenguins with KDE.