Making windows slightly translucent when moving has always seemed gimmicky-- a cheap and amateurish effect in 2017 for a desktop as mature and professional as Plasma. I think it would improve the user experience as well as consistency with other platforms to ship with it turned off. But if that's just me, I'll go back to my hole and shake my cane at clouds again...
we have no indications that users dislike it or think it is not professional.
I feel we should bring this back to the table. Assuming there is no data against it doesn't mean it is well-liked. One could make the same argument on the contrary. "There isn't any data backing its use up, therefore, we should be just fine to not enable it." I recommend that we take this request and disable the moving-transparency. It makes the system look stable, not screaming for attention, and we save users CPU cycles. We can very likely use translucency in other areas of the system where it would be more fitting. Can a patch be made for this?
Re-opening since the Visual Design Group has decided to re-visit the issue.
This is not the place for deciding this. I don't like bug reports being open for discussions. Sorry this is a technical issue board which should help us developers manage the issues. If we clutter it with random things to discuss we just make the life of developers more difficult. If you as VDG want to change it, because you think it's not well liked, then I suggest to collect data on it. E.g. figure out how many users change the default. Sorry to say but without any hard numbers showing this is a bad default I'm not going to allow this setting to be changed. This has been the default for 9 years and I cannot remember that anyone ever complained about it. We have complaints about many things and I notice if issues come up again and again. This default does not belong to it. This means to me that I don't think that this feature is disliked or that users would prefer a different default.
We're not really arguing that users hate it, but rather than it's not necessarily consistent with the visual direction we want to evolve Plasma in. In what venue would you like to discuss this matter? We'd love to have you in the #VDG telegram room.
Please be aware that this is a usability feature and not a design element.
(In reply to Martin Flöser from comment #6) > Please be aware that this is a usability feature and not a design element. Can you explain this idea further?
Git commit b29f211fe400735918e5970b5aa8b86dd8af624f by Nate Graham. Committed on 14/05/2021 at 15:21. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. Disable translucency effect by default Many reasons have been brought up over the years for why this effect is not appropriate to be enabled by default: - It was designed to highlight the whizzy technical feature of being able to make windows transparent, which is no longer particularly impressive today. - It looks visually dated. - It can produce a confusing visual soup by blending a window being moved or resized with the content below it, which we recently disabled for the Highlight Windows effect. - If one window is covering up another as a way to deliberately hide the content of the lower window, this effect will reveal the hidden content whenever the upper window is moved or resized at all. Overall it does not seem to have enough advantages to offset these issues. Let's disable it by default--but only for the people who did not modify its configuration at all. We can assume that those people like it, so let's keep it on for them. FIXED-IN: 5.23 Closes Phab task T7915 A +23 -0 kconf_update/kwin-5.23-disable-translucency-effect.sh M +6 -0 kconf_update/kwin.upd M +0 -1 src/effects/translucency/package/metadata.desktop https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/commit/b29f211fe400735918e5970b5aa8b86dd8af624f
User comment here: I actually like this as it enables me to see what's underneath the window being dragged without moving it out of the way completely. Therefore it is a great aid in window management. So actually I think it's a regression in usability.
The effect is still there, it's just not enabled by default. You can enable it in system settings.
Sure, but if the effect increases usability why not enable it by default? I recall in the first days of windows managers (i.e. early Windows, Linux), dragging a window would show a dashed rectangle in place of the window. It was only later on that a solid window was added as an option.
We can't meet the needs of every person. That's why we have options, so people can tweak their systems up to their needs. However, on this one, I agree with VDG. Making move-resize windows translucent by default is inappropriate.