I want to raise a discussion here how to make transparent themes look nice without composition support.
So: When a theme designer makes a theme transparent, then he wants something to show through the theme. Without composition, the window manager will not supply that background, so in order to keep it looking similar to the way the designer has intended, plasma needs to paint a background behind the theme. The question is now, how the background should look. The best thing about transparent themes is that they adapt to the background wallpaper. When you have a blue wallpaper, the panel is blue, when you have a red wallpaper the panel is red, etc. Some themes have opaque versions, like oxygen. These usually just pick a random background color, and put it statically into the background. In oxygen for example the panel is always blue, which imo looks ugly with for example an orange background, while it perfectly fits to the default oxygen wallpaper. It makes much more sense to dynamically transform these transparent themes into opaque ones, to create a coherent desktop look. In practice this would mean: Take the average color of the wallpaper, and paint it behind all the floating parts of the theme(panel, krunner, etc.). This already looks quite nice. But since many plasma themes have a glassy look, they highly profit from something more shining through them, since that's the only way they can retain that look. Transparency is not available, but even without composition, one could use another metaphor instead: Reflection. Just pick an arbitrary image, and paint it behind the theme object and behind the color, and voila, themes look as nice as with composition, even without it, and without fake transparency. Just as a comparison: Normal opaque version (Color fixed by theme): http://zwabel.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/opaque_panel.png Color-matched version: http://zwabel.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/color_matched_panel.png Color-matched plus reflection: http://zwabel.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/color_matched_panel_with_background.png In order to reach all this, I propose allowing the theme to paint behind floating parts: - A color given through the configuration file - A pattern given through the configuration file With the color thing implemented, adding support for a pattern is only a question of a few lines, and I cannot see a rational reason behind not allowing it when allowing the color. I have implemented this, had it for review for quite long without significant feedback, committed it, and now it was reverted, so please let's have a rational discussion on this. Please keep in mind that not all users can use composition (That subject is out of discussion). Greetings, David _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
