astatide / kwinOverview

In progress KWin script for emulating GNOME/macOS style activity switchers.
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Black Background #6

Open astatide opened 6 years ago

astatide commented 6 years ago

It seems that if the user has never changed the wallpaper for the current activity, there's a possibility that the activity wallpaper is blank. Under these circumstances, there's nothing but black rectangles shown for the desktops.

A quick work around is to simply change the wallpaper. While I can't 'fix' this here (as it's related to how activities are handled), a better long term solution may be to implement logic displaying a border and/or a notification when a wallpaper image can't be found.

koma111 commented 5 years ago

Also if the user happens to use a non-static wallpaper plugin (Picture Of The Day for instance), the desktops are black rectangles, and the background of the entire effect is black.

The script is very good nevertheless, thanks again for making it. And I am not really sure how could this be fixed, as these plugins change the wallpaper every day or more frequently. Maybe there is some variable somewhere that points to the actual wallpaper set by these plugins. Or could it possibly work like a blurred transparent overlay? This way the background would at least work, still not sure about the desktop boxes.

I am willing to test v2 when you think it is in some sort of Beta state.

astatide commented 5 years ago

I've started a new job, so unfortunately this hobby project has been pushed off the plate a bit. I did do a great deal of refactoring during December but didn't have time to finish it (limited hardware availability).

I now have a desktop again and am feeling the itch to work on this, so this is something I'll look into. One thing that's frustrating about this approach is that there is likely a performance ceiling, as the kwin scripting interface has limited control over the actual thumbnail objects. I've noticed that a lot of other implementations of this dodge the issue by not using live previews, even when powerful hardware is available; I have some thoughts on that but we'll see.