"Blur" effect only works for some windows

[SecretCode]

I'm talking about the "Blur Effect" you can select at System Settings > Desktop Effects > All Effects tab > scroll to Appearance, "Blur".

It enables blurring of whatever's behind a translucent window. And if you're going to have translucent (semi-transparent) windows at all, I think you need this too, but opinions vary, fair enough.

I know that it requires certain capabilities from your video card, and a driver that exposes those capabilities. I have it working with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M card and the proprietary NVIDIA driver (iirc it also worked with the nouveau driver). I also had no problems getting alpha blurring to work under Compiz on a GNOME-based system.

But ... it only blurs the background of Plasma windows ... like the Network Manager popup or the panel itself or the Device Notifier popup. It doesn't blur behind translucent Konsole windows, or behind any windows I make translucent using the "Translucency" effect further down the same settings page. However, Compiz handles both of these situations fine.

So my question is this ... does this Desktop Effect even support this? Does anyone, with any KDE 4 version on any distro with any graphics card and any driver, have a translucent Konsole window with its background blurred?

[OneLine]

Magick box tells that

KDE forum (KDE 4.5): http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=88816

joethefox wrote:
What about konsole/yakuake with background transparency or an opaque window? Will be kwin able to apply the blur effect?

mgraesslin/KDE Developer wrote:
We decided that it would be wrong to blur the background of all windows. E.g. there are valid usecases to see through a Konsole window. So a window which wants to be blurred has to tell that it wants to be blurred. That is the application has to implement it. We already discussed possible ways how to get blurring into Konsole as it is quite complex in that case.

A wish: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198175
&
From the konsole-devel: http://lists.kde.org/?t=127582710000001&r=1&w=4

The

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0

seems to work with the KDE 4.7.4




The KDE review board: https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/4292/

This patch adds an option to Konsole's color scheme editor to enable blurring on transparent backgrounds. It makes use of the new _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION Atom recognized by KWin.
When tabs are switched it checks whether the color scheme of the new tab has blurring enabled and enables or disables blurring accordingly.

The latest is:

Kurt Hindenburg 6 months ago (August 9th, 2011, 2:57 p.m.)
FYI, if anyone is interested in looking at this again.

[OneLine]

Magick box spits out

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...content=127752

Description:
Oxygen style and decoration with support for transparency

https://projects.kde.org/projects/pl...en-transparent

Oxygen-transparent is a fork of the default KDE widget and window decoration theme (Oxygen) that supports transparency for application windows. It requires that compositing is supported on your system and that desktop effects are enabled. It is best used with kwin's blur effect.

For technical reasons, Oxygen-transparent cannot be merged with the official oxygen theme because of small (but hard to fix issues):

- window placement on the screen is altered when translucency is set (due to an issue in Qt)

- some embedded windows (and notably video players) appear as black (and wont update), and therefore need to be 'black-listed' (which is not acceptable for official KDE code)

- the theme is quite demanding in terms of resources, especially when used together with blur effect.

However, due to the minimal amount of code added on top of the original code, it is kept synchronized with the official theme and provides as many features.

[SecretCode]

Thanks OneLine ... I was afraid of that. Worse than "we didn't get around to implementing yet": "we have something in our vision that means we have ignore this intuitive requirement".

mgraesslin/KDE Developer wrote:
We decided that it would be wrong to blur the background of all windows. E.g. there are valid usecases to see through a Konsole window. So a window which wants to be blurred has to tell that it wants to be blurred. That is the application has to implement it. We already discussed possible ways how to get blurring into Konsole as it is quite complex in that case.

Ah yes ... mgraesslin ... the same one who said

In general we ignore feature requests.
We have our own roadmap which does not align with user wishes.
If a user wishes for something like that he has to contribute.

This is the aspect of KDE which makes me uncomfortable. Both in the small sense of not being to get intuitively-correct functionality, and in the major sense of an expectation to use KDE-aware apps instead of cross-platform apps ... see my signature.

That xprop commands works, indeed ... I wonder if it can be automated for every new Konsole window?

Looks like I should try out oxygen-transparent.

And raise a feature request against the "Translucency" desktop effect.

[SecretCode]

By the way, I can't see your imageshack.us images unless I am personally logged in to imageshack ... one reason I don't use them any more.

[OneLine]

That xprop commands works, indeed ... I wonder if it can be automated for every new Konsole window?

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198175

Comment #22 From Thomas Lübking...

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION
0 -id `qdbus org.kde.konsole /konsole/MainWindow_1 winId`

A crude way is to add a script call after the konsole call.

An example script, trans.sh, will blur the first nine konsoles.

#!/bin/bash

for I in {1..9}; do
   xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -id `qdbus org.kde.konsole /konsole/MainWindow_$I winId`
done

The script call can be added to the KDE menu.




Or replace the /usr/bin/konsole with a script to launch the konsole and do the blur.