Hey guys,

in the past few weeks something's really bothering me.
Having composting turned off, how come plasma widgets can have transparency effects, but panels not?

Compositing runs quite slow on my pc (AMD Athlon 3000+ @2GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 9500GT 512MB) and I'm not sure if it's because the single core cpu, bad configuration or something else....

My question though is why plasma widgets can have transparency even without compositing, but panels can't .
I'm not asking for some hacky fake transparency, but obviously there's some way to do it for the widgets...

PS. I'm using Kubuntu 10.04, KDE 4.5.1
PS2. Congratulations to the developers and everyone, who's involved in KDE for making such beatiful DE.

The reason is that the widgets are all part of the same "window". It is the same reason, for instance, gimp or inkscape can have transparency amongst image elements when compositing is off, rendering transparency between elements of the same window is not hard.

However, the panel is a separate window. You can easily have transparency between elements of the panel. However. since the panel and the desktop are two separate windows, you can't have transparency between them without compositing. The reason they are separate windows are for things like "panel covers window" and "autohide panel", both of which have the panel above a window. You can't do this unless the panel is a separate window. It is the same reason the widget dashboard can have transparency between widgets without compositing but can't show transparency for the windows on your screen without it.

If the only thing you want is transparency, have you tried turning off every desktop effect besides transparency?

TheBlackCat, thank you for your kind response. I now understand why panels can't have transparency without compositing .

I tweaked my xorg.conf a bit and now using XRender for compositing makes everything more pretty and usable . However I lost vertical sync on Boxee, but that's for tomorrow.

Thank you!
All the Best,
Dimitar Mihaylov