"Fake" blurred window transparency with almost zero GPU cycles
Hello everyone. First post! Thank you for the amazing work that everyone is doing on the KDE apps and Plasma. I've come across a potentially novel strategy for simulating a global blurred transparency effect (similar to macOS Finder etc.) for the entire desktop and all windows. The implementation is resource- efficient, requiring minimal GPU usage and trivial coding effort. It's so simple that someone MUST have thought of it before. Yet, I cannot find any references online. Screenshot: https://seven.systems/global-transparency.png It works like this: - Draw the wallpaper as normal, with alpha = 1, as the bottom layer - Draw the desktop and all windows as usual - Draw a pre-rendered, blurred version of the wallpaper on top of everything else, with alpha = desired_window_transparency (say, 0.15). - Done! This creates a convincing ILLUSION of individually blurred transparent windows, without the need for dynamic blur or extensive code changes. Drawbacks: - Slight reduction of overall window contrast - Individual areas of windows cannot be excluded - Excluding individual windows from blurred transparency would require changing z-order (drawing them on top of the blurred wallpaper copy) Despite these trade-offs, it's incredibly effective and lightweight, and probably "good enough" for the majority of real-world use cases (I've been using this for years and have not come across any "showstoppers" in practice). Just wanted to drop this into the wild and capable hands that could potentially make good use of it! Hope this is the right place. Thanks! Best regards -- Alexander Ewering
KDE Gear projects with failing CI (master) (14 January 2025)
Please work on fixing them, otherwise i will remove the failing CI jobs on their 4th failing week, it is very important that CI is passing for multiple reasons. Good news: 3 repositories were fixed Bad news: 4 repositories started failing kamera - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kamera/-/pipelines/865501 * FreeBSD build fails * It's a gphoto2 bug but we should probably workaround it * https://github.com/gphoto/libgphoto2/issues/1077 elisa - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/elisa/-/pipelines/864349 * databaseInterfaceTest fails in freebsd kasts - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kasts/-/pipelines/865041 * All android builds fail kweather - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kweather/-/pipelines/864586 * All android builds fail Cheers, Albert
KDE Gear projects with failing CI (release/24.12) (14 January 2025)
Please work on fixing them, otherwise i will remove the failing CI jobs on their 4th failing week, it is very important that CI is passing for multiple reasons. Good news: 4 projects were fixed Bad news: 3 new projects have started failing kamera - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kamera/-/pipelines/864620 * FreeBSD build fails * It's a gphoto2 bug but we should probably workaround it * https://github.com/gphoto/libgphoto2/issues/1077 elisa - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/elisa/-/pipelines/864720 * databaseInterfaceTest fails in freebsd kweather - NEW * https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kweather/-/pipelines/864747 * All android builds fail Cheers, Albert
Re: KDE Gear projects with failing CI (master) (14 January 2025)
El dimarts, 14 de gener del 2025, a les 22:44:09 (Hora estàndard del Centre d’Europa), Albert Astals Cid va escriure: > Please work on fixing them, otherwise i will remove the failing CI jobs on > their 4th failing week, it is very important that CI is passing for multiple > reasons. > > Good news: 3 repositories were fixed > > Bad news: 4 repositories started failing > > > kamera - NEW > * https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kamera/-/pipelines/865501 > * FreeBSD build fails >* It's a gphoto2 bug but we should probably workaround it > * https://github.com/gphoto/libgphoto2/issues/1077 How does https://invent.kde.org/graphics/kamera/-/merge_requests/20 feel? Cheers, Albert > > > elisa - NEW > * https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/elisa/-/pipelines/864349 > * databaseInterfaceTest fails in freebsd > > > kasts - NEW > * https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kasts/-/pipelines/865041 > * All android builds fail > > > kweather - NEW > * https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kweather/-/pipelines/864586 > * All android builds fail > > > Cheers, > Albert
