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For KDE4.3, Blur Effect has been removed from Kwin.
This is not bad : as it was said, it was poorly coded... it didn\'t even work with me (only with PC-BSD).

Still, the Blur Effect is a very important piece in an environment playing on transparency... and KDE plays a lot with transparency.
Some widgets can\'t be read when a window is behind them : blur effect can fix that.

Removing the blur effect wasn\'t a bad idea : but a good idea would be to reimplement another fast. And another which would work : blur is possible, as you can see when the shut down panel pop up.
Why can\'t it work with transparency ?

Blur is currently implemented.... somewhere in KDE... because I see a lovely blur when I go to logout.

I agree totally that it is needed to make semi-transparent menues usable. I\'m sure its on the devs todo list however.

We consider removing the blur as a regression. That is: we want to have a blur effect again.

Nevertheless we think that we can only ship a new blur, if it doesn\'t cause problems like the old one, is fast and good looking. Up to now we have not yet found any solution which suits all needs.

Btw: the blur in logout effect is a result of various trials to implement a better blur effect for 4.3.

Huh? I don't see any blur in the logout effect (4.3.0 here).

majewsky wrote:Huh? I don't see any blur in the logout effect (4.3.0 here).

Then your graphics card/driver doesn't support it. Quiet fallbacks are quiet. =)

Zarin wrote:Then your graphics card/driver doesn't support it. Quiet fallbacks are quiet. =)

I see. On my other machine with an Nvidia card, the blur works (although it seems to pixelate the original image a bit before blurring, which makes it look a bit weird).

Hey, just want to bump this. Is this being worked on by anyone? Is it possible to check who that person is and if progress has been made? Can we hope to see a functioning blur effect (at least semi on par with the equivalent Compiz effect) by 4.4?

A really good blur effect (and not one as weak as the previous, buggy one was - I'm talking about gaussian blurs with 15 pixel radii here, and not something that looks like a bloom effect if the window is transparent enough) is essential for a desktop that has anything related to transparency at all. Transparency is only compatible with a productive desktop experience as long as it doesn't annoy the user, because transparency is supposed to make the UI "melt" together with its surroundings to make the user focus on important things, and as long as the transparency in KDE isn't combined with a blur, you'll be able to see text through menus, see high-contrast textures in general through various UI elements, and such things annoy the eye.

It is therefore very important that this feature exists and works. I would even say that it is the most important feature I'm missing from KDE 4.3. If it isn't present in KDE 4.4, it would be really disappointing for me, and probably for a lot of other users.

This is something I really miss. I remember seeing an option to make the titlebar translucent in an earlier KDE version.
Can't find it now (probably I am too lazy to search for it ), but personally, I think it'll be cool to have a glassy titlebar with blur (Nah, not a vista fanboi I once used this with compiz and really liked it)

sayakb wrote:This is something I really miss. I remember seeing an option to make the titlebar translucent in an earlier KDE version.
Can't find it now (probably I am too lazy to search for it ), but personally, I think it'll be cool to have a glassy titlebar with blur (Nah, not a vista fanboi I once used this with compiz and really liked it)

Blur isn't there, but you can still go to Desktop Effects --> All Effects --> Translucency to set the titlebar translucency.

Ah-a, there it is Decoration translucency. Now some blur can make it nicer

@sayakb,
please take a look at the "Aurorae Decoration Theme Engine" (it's available in the Extragear repository in your distribution of choice). It uses SVG images for window frames and has some very slick transparent themes.

However, as I said, transparency is worthless without blur, and I really want to stress the point that if KDE gets a blur plugin, it has to be a STRONG one.