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KDE 4.0.3 ReleasedKDE 4.0.3 ReleasedPosted Apr 2, 2008 20:53 UTC (Wed) by alecs1 (subscriber, #46699)Parent article: KDE 4.0.3 Released
For one of the most wanted features go to this bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152030 There you can see long discussions about the colors of the default window decoration. A bug that many of us have reported and voted. The problem is that without shadows you need great efforts to distinquish which window is which. There are patches but they were rejected on some obscure reason. This is very entertaint to follow.
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KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 3, 2008 6:12 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] I haven't read the comments, but I've read a lot of other talks about the windowdecoration, and to me, it makes perfectly sense. Oxygen blends the windowdecoration with the window. Coloring the windowdecoration on non-active windows would destroy the whole look. So they are looking for other solutions, like changing buttons and color of text (which works good enough, imho). Not that hard to understand, is it? Nor very unique, the same is true for some Windows and Mac themes.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 3, 2008 7:21 UTC (Thu) by alecs1 (subscriber, #46699) [Link] True, more or less. But only Apple can be sure that they will have the means to provide the computing power for the efects. Windows Vista is in a good position, not like OS X, but still, video cards drivers traditionally work at their full, and also that OS has means of knowing that the effects will work or no. KDE is in the worst position: it will probably run on Linux, where many drivers have problems, and where a newbie may give up before learning about how to make things work (some may not work at all in spite of all eforts); and KDE does not have the means to fall back to another theme. My site has 10 visitors a day, but if it would have more I would sure make a poll to see what is the percent of people that have good graphic card acceleration on Linux.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 3, 2008 15:31 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] This solutions don't have anything to do with accelerated graphics, composition managers, decent drivers, etc, however. Yes, without subtle shadows provided by a CM then some more distinct "this is the active window" clues are desirable, and those solutions would exist in the traditional graphics realm. > KDE does not have the means to fall back to another theme. You mean automatically? We do this in Plasma (turn on/off compositing at runtime and watch things adjust; it's pretty neat), so it is technically very doable. A few lines of code in kwin and the KApplication class would probably suffice. The real question is whether Oxygen should be a "CM-only" theme. That would be something of a shame because it works perfectly without it. The only real quibble is some people (in many caseee, probably in part due to contrast or gamma settings of their display) have issues telling active from non-active screens, or where one begins and another ends. That problem is likely solvable with a little thought and effort. In the meantime, pushing for various solutions that are little more than work-arounds or which just don't jive with the artistic L&F of the style is probably non-productive.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 3, 2008 17:02 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Artistic tastes should take a back seat to providing basic functionality. If I can't differentiate between active and inactive windows on my desktop, that is a *severe* usability issue and I don't think wait till we figure out the ideal solution that fits into our grand artistic vision is a good answer. The good thing about KDE was that it makes practical compromises to meet real world needs while driving forward and some of the current ideas don't really fit well into that.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 4, 2008 15:31 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] If you can't differentiate between active and non-active windows, you should: - begin by fixing your monitor contrast settings - try to increase the contrast of the color theme - change the colortheme to change the whole window (INCLUDING decoration) to another color if focus changes The current way of differentiating between active and non-active windows might be slightly less obvious than the previous one, but it's not bad. If you can't see it, you should give your monitor (or eyes) a checkup. And there now is a way to let any widget and color change with the focus changes, so the consistency doesn't have to get worse. The reason they didn't use that is because it makes the screen seem to 'flash' when switching windows, as the whole window changes color. Apparently, you can't see the subtle effects, so it might be exactly what you need. Or just a black and white theme.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 4, 2008 16:35 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] The current way is just too subtle and not usable. There is nothing wrong with the monitor or eyes as this has been a problem so many others have noted as seen in the bug report and the suggestion to change colour scheme or decoration doesn't take into the consideration the very notable problem with the default which is what we are talking about here.
KDE 4.0.3 Released Posted Apr 3, 2008 17:25 UTC (Thu) by alecs1 (subscriber, #46699) [Link] I hope you will read my answer, I had no intention of continuing the discussion here. And by no means I am trashing KDE, which I use everyday. The link to the bug I posted more for its fun value. Shadows do need good graphical acceleration, that one of my computers cannot provide. I just tried it a minute ago. I edited the xorg.conf and enabled compositing. Restart and go enable desktop effects. 10 seconds with a black screen and back to the normal one, a good thing, developers took care to fall back to a working configuration. I selected XRender instead of OpenGL and got: no shadows, extremely slow programs and artifacts as in this picture: http://img221.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot4xt2.png You can trust me that everything was slow and that this is not an edited picture. So saying that the default configuration is having usability problems on many computers is not a lie, and it may be a few lines of code that solve this, but they are still missing after many months.
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