Bug 363675

Summary:	thumbnailaside: thumbnails of active windows should (conditionally) be skipped
Product:	[Plasma] kwin	Reporter:	Kubuntiac <user581>
Component:	effects-various	Assignee:	KWin default assignee <kwin-bugs-null>
Status:	REPORTED ---
Severity:	wishlist
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	5.6.4
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Kubuntiac 2016-05-29 19:00:17 UTC

Part of my daily workflow is to have video podcasts playing in the corner of the screen using thumbnail aside while I work.

Sometimes though, I want to briefly switch to see the video fullscreen, so I alt+tab to the window to see it, and then alt+tab back after the part I needed to see.

In Plasma 4, when you switched to a window that you had thumbnailed, the thumbnail would be temporarily switched off until you switched to another window. This way the thumbnail didn't get in the way of seeing the actual window.

In Plasma 5, that behaviour seems to have disappeared and I find myself having to alt+tab and then manually switch off the thumbnail with meta+ctrl+t and then meta+ctrl+t again before switching back with alt+tab again.

I'm requesting that the auto-hide thumbnail be reimplemented, with only one small difference. Before it only used to hide when the window was set to fullscreen. I'm requesting that instead it be whenever the thumnailed window is in focus. This way I can use it to watch browser windows made fullscreen with F11 (which don't use the window managers fullscreen attribute) as well.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Turn on thumbnail aside
2. Thumbnail a browser window  thats been made fullscreen with F11
3.  Focus that window

Actual Results:  
thumbnail is superimposed over the fullscreen window

Expected Results:  
thumbnail hides until another window is focused

Comment 1 Thomas Lübking 2016-05-29 19:57:17 UTC

ftr, the effect never behaved like this.

What likely happened technically was that you had fullscreen windows unredirected in the old setup (it's not the default behavior)

   "kcmshell5 kwincompositing", "suspend compositing for fullscreen windows"

It would only apply to fullscreen windows, isn't supported for intel IGPs since ages (as the driver likes/d to crash on that occasion) and is actually a discouraged setting (because of the troubles we had with it in contrast to the very limited gain in terms of freed resources)

Comment 2 Kubuntiac 2016-05-30 03:30:10 UTC

Ahh, interesting. That makes sense that disable compositing for fullscreen windows would get rid of the thumbnails. I always assumed that the convenience of thumbnails disappearing for fullscreen windows was an intended feature, not an implementation side effect.

Anyway, nonetheless, as a user, it's never desirable to have a fullscreen window have it's own thumbnail superimposed over itself. Thumbnails are only commonly useful for windows that aren't being seen fullsize already. Thus having them automatically turn off for the focused window (only) makes for a largely transparent convenience to the user.