The Overview is a valuable tool for organizing virtual desktops, however desktop widgets are visible underneath windows in the Overview which makes the windows much harder to distinguish at a glance. As you likely will not be interacting with desktop widgets while in the Overview, it would make sense to hide them.
Created attachment 166815 [details] The Overview effect showing desktop widgets behind windows, making windows harder to distinguish.
Agreed, and icons too. These don't make sense to show in the Overview.
So some internal discussion in KWin: removing the desktop's contents is a technical can of worms that's probably not worth it. The biggest impact is on the window titles, which can be obscured by visually busy background content, so for that, we could potentially replace the shadow with a black pill background. We could even potentially add a similar background around all the windows to distinguish them from the background.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/5976
Git commit 07dcede8203eeba7ab772278a1c075701732a2ac by Akseli Lahtinen. Committed on 26/06/2024 at 16:00. Pushed by akselmo into branch 'master'. WindowHeapDelegate: Label text background Give label text background color to make it easier to distinct from the background. M +10 -3 src/plugins/private/qml/WindowHeapDelegate.qml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/07dcede8203eeba7ab772278a1c075701732a2ac
Git commit 9b7e0b70fbd16e5e00d29207b054ca0c5b5501b6 by Akseli Lahtinen. Committed on 26/06/2024 at 16:47. Pushed by akselmo into branch 'Plasma/6.1'. WindowHeapDelegate: Label text background Give label text background color to make it easier to distinct from the background. (cherry picked from commit 07dcede8203eeba7ab772278a1c075701732a2ac) 840a43da WindowHeapDelegate: add a light background to the delegate item fcb80fc7 Set background color for label only 41e9c231 Fix formatting 9487e36b Remove id 2fc1d80c Use contentWidth instead of width 70bbe672 Don't draw caption on top of icon f1463d35 Use largeSpacing for label topmargin 0484872f Use pc3 label 0ad87b1f Use qualified access 20d47f83 Dont set the background to highlight color df823831 Remove z's, use contentHeight 2310a19d remove unneeded property Co-authored-by: Akseli Lahtinen <akselmo@akselmo.dev> M +10 -3 src/plugins/private/qml/WindowHeapDelegate.qml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/9b7e0b70fbd16e5e00d29207b054ca0c5b5501b6