I know turning on compositing causes the dashboard to be transparent, which is fine if you have your dashboard set to just show the desktop widgets.

If you want to use the dashboard for a separate widgets set though, it's annoying because transparent widgets (90% of well done plasma themes use transparency) on top of transparent widgets through a transparent dashboard just amounts to eyestrain and confusion. On top of that, I have a nice spacey theme going and I have a separate background I'd like to use on the dashboard.

Is there a setting, config file, environment variable, or other thing hidden away from the GUI that would allow me to use an opaque background while keeping compositing on?

I confirm this observation, it effectively makes having a seperate dashboard a useless feature if you have applets on the desktop. I would recommend filing a bug at bugs.kde.org about that. Applets on the Desktop should be automatically hidden.

For being able to set a seperate background, you will need to file a wishlist report at bugs.kde.org.

Those settings are not currently available, but someone is working on a dashboard effect for kwin that will allow you to control things like tansparency and blur for the dashboard. It should be available in KDE SC 4.6.

Yeah, it was me working on the dashboard effect!

The new KWin dashboard effect is in trunk and can be tested with KDE SC 4.6 beta 1. You can modify brightness, saturation and blur of the dashboard.

For your use case, two settings would apply:

Either enable blurring of the background -> makes transparent widgets on the dashboard more readable while remain cool looks

- or -

Set background brightness to 0%, causing the dashboard background to be black.

Hi ademmer and thanks for your work!

Is the dashboard effect supposed to work together with glide effect?

Because I think it looks far more elegant simply fading/blurring/de-saturating without zoom-in/out effects provided by glide. Maybe it is one more bug of glide.

Another idea is having the dashboard effect also apply when closing the dashboard.

When the dashboard effect is enabled, it prevents that any other effect is used to display the dashboard, such as glide or zoom.

Instead, the dashboard fades in nicely. You can adjust the timespan which means that you can either let the dashboard fade in smoothly (500ms+) or just let it appear without any bling bling (0ms).

ademmer wrote:When the dashboard effect is enabled, it prevents that any other effect is used to display the dashboard, such as glide or zoom.

I see. Then it is a bug in glide effect.

ademmer wrote:Instead, the dashboard fades in nicely. You can adjust the timespan which means that you can either let the dashboard fade in smoothly (500ms+) or just let it appear without any bling bling (0ms).

It surely does fade in nicely Great job!

My suggestion was however to also have it fade out when the dashboard closes.
Just a suggestion though, no worries.