When walking through Desktops (in my case with the hotkey Ctrl-Tab), the list with desktops does not show the window icons for each desktop, as I think it should. This used to work before my upgrade from KDE 4.7 to 4.8, and it still works for seconds after login or after a kwin crash (which seems to happen more frequently now). After that, the feature goes away. This makes it extremely difficult to find the desktop I am looking for, as they all look identical in the list. I am not using desktop effects (as this disabled this exact feature -or had the same problem- in earlier versions of KDE). In these (reduced) screenshots, picture 1 (http://static.inky.ws/image/1690/image.jpg) shows how the desktop list used to look, and picture 2 (http://static.inky.ws/image/1691/image.jpg) how it looks now (ignore the different backgrounds).
This is very interesting news. Thanks for the report - I have not changed the icon code for 4.8 and the fact that it is gone will hopefully have just enlightened me about a different problem. Do I understand correctly that you are also experiencing crashes while using ctrl+Tab?
Yes, I get the crashes when using Ctrl-Tab to switch (between my 12) virtual desktops. The crash handler tells me it's kwin. I recompiled everything with debug options (I'm using Gentoo) to file a proper bug report with backtrace, but the crash handler tells me it still doesn't find (enough) debug info to make it useful. Meanwhile I also tried upgrading to KDE from 4.8.1 to 4.8.2, but the same issues show up (icons disappear after a few seconds, up to ~1-2 minutes, and reappear for the same length of time after most kwin crashes. kwin crashes are still very common upon Ctrl-Tab in 4.8.2. I also tried upgrading qt, using the combinations kde-4.7.4 + qt-4.7.4 (works), kde-4.8.1 + qt-4.7.4 (problems), kde-4.8.2 + qt-4.8.1 (problems). Mind you, each takes a while to compile on Gentoo ;-)
the crash is bug #285747 - we are still looking for a reliable way to reproduce the issue.
merging with newer bug report *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 306187 ***