Blur effect needed on transparency

[mfreeman72]

 * Cinnamon version 4.4.8
 * Distribution - Mint 19.3
 * Graphics hardware - AMD A8 GPU (Radeon R5) with current open source driver
 * 64 bit

Issue Any time a transparency is used (especially panels and panel menus), any text or hard lines/textures behind it make text on the menu difficult to read. I would like to request an optional blurred effect behind transparencies. I know that this has been discussed in the past, and it used to be possible to put a bump map image behind it (that's not necessarily what I'm looking for, but it had a similar result), but that issue has been closed with no resolution. I would like to see just a simple, basic blur implemented. Other desktops have this feature, and it not only looks really nice, but makes text on transparent menus and panels much more readable by softening hard lines behind them. Please consider this for future Cinnamon versions.

[brownsr]

There's a PR in for this. Still work in progress as there was a stability fault found at the last stage.

Regards

Simon

[viliampucik]

@brownsr Please let me ask you what is the status of the PR? BTW is there a way one can help with the code or its testing?

[brownsr]

@viliampucik I have not found time to work on the PR for a while. You will see it in the list of open PRs, marked WIP. There were two problems, the first is a segfault. I never had that, my suspicion is that it might be caused by having two simultaneous such effects (blur and bumpmap) on at the same time. A case I never tried during development. If so then that would not probably be that hard to debug.The other was that as a screen snapshot effect, it was very 'busy' on something like the menu where it reacted to menu bar highlighting and pointer movement. I had planned to research the menu to find if there was a more appropriate piece of CSS to try it on, as ideally it should be applied just to the menu background and not to the active menu elements such as the current menu item or the mouse. If you want to pick up on this and send any resulting changes to me then that might be very helpful. Or copy the PR, amend, and send in separately of course.

Regards

Simon

[viliampucik]

Many thanks @brownsr for the details, really appreciated! I am going to familiarize myself with the internals and hopefully test and submit PR in the near future.

Recently I have switched from Deepin to Cinnamon and I really like the work that has been done in Cinnamon. The transparent and bluer effect offered by Deepin and UKUI make those environments stood out. If Cinnamon provides such eye candy as well, it may attract more users and contributors to this nice project.

[nelwa]

Are there any new developments regarding this feature? I would also like this eye candy blur effect to be available.

[R3tr0BoiDX]

Me tooooo

[akirapink]

Many thanks @ brownsr for the details, really appreciated! I am going to familiarize myself with the internals and hopefully test and submit PR in the near future.

hey, @viliampucik , any progress on that? not to be annoying, if not that's fine

[Janne-d-Arc]

I would really like this feature, I think it greatly improves the look of transparency. I like it so much that as a "cheap" workaround I use the "Transparent panels" extension and applied a blur on the area covered by the panel directly on the wallpaper using Gimp obtaining results like these:

I would love it if one day Cinnamon could make an effect like that without having to edit my wallpapers.

[Secret-chest]

It should be optional and decided on by the theme. This is worked on.

[fredcw]

@Janne-d-Arc I tried adding background-blur: 16px; to the .panel-bottom selector (#panel selector also works) in the cinnamon.css file of the current cinnamon theme while also setting the background-color to fully transparent in the same selector. Unfortunately there's a couple of bugs: using it on a side panel (left or right) crashes cinnamon so that's a non starter, and on the top or bottom panel, it works mostly fine except that moving a window next to the panel can sometimes leave some visual artefacts, more noticeable on the bottom panel than the top.

Edit: There is an open issue for this. #11822

[Janne-d-Arc]

@fredcw I knew that since at least 2012 tests were being done with transparencies (https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=97101) but I didn't know that this was already implemented at in an experimental way! Too bad it's still unstable but I'll still do some tests with the settings you mention, thank you very much!

[mfreeman72]

@fredcw Awesome! I'm glad this is being worked on! The results are actually pretty beautiful, as long as it's not in one of the crash conditions you mentioned, and it's not being interacted with. Hopefully it will become stable enough for everyday use sometime soon.

[JosephMcc]

As far as I know, no one is working on this. This is still the same PR that was merged quite a long time ago and frankly, is broken and nowhere being in any sort of usable state.

[mfreeman72]

That's unfortunate. Blur makes transparency actually usable and readable. Without it, any text or hard-line objects behind the transparency make text on top of the transparency difficult to read, if not completely unreadable. Blur is, in my opinion, an absolute must-have on transparent themes. Without it, transparency hinders, if not utterly destroys usability.

[JosephMcc]

@mfreeman72 I agree. Transparency is pretty much useless without it. I will add, and it's only my opinion, that I find the whole blurred transparency things a bit of a gimmick. I wouldn't be interested in it even if it worked except in very small doses.

[mfreeman72]

@JosephMcc To each his own, I guess. I personally love the look of a blurred transparent background, if done right. But I'm more of an artist/musician than a technical user, so I prefer things to be as visually and aurally appealing as possible, more than technically effective.

[sakralbar]

It seems to me that the blur effect is what cinnamon lacks in order to look a little more cute and modern.

[mfreeman72]

@fredcw

it works mostly fine except that moving a window next to the panel can sometimes leave some visual artefacts, more noticeable on the bottom panel than the top.

Looking at how some have implemented this in Gnome, they also had artifacts. They got around it by creating a .drirc file in the user's home folder, and putting the following in it:

<device screen="0" driver="dri2"> <application name="Default"> <option name="vblank_mode" value="0"/> </application> </device>

This doesn't work for NVIDIA GPU's, but they had a different solution for that (see the Issues section of the Readme at https://github.com/Spirrwell/mutter-rounded).

Anyway, I tried this in Cinnamon, and it pretty much solves the artifacting problems, except that a small line appears on either side of panel applets when the mouse moves over them. But they go away quickly. So it's pretty close to being a non-issue. Now I just need to experiment to see if this can also be implemented in panel menus...

[mfreeman72]

Yep, it does work, and it looks really nice! However, the same line surrounds things the mouse moves over in some menus, and it's definitely more pronounced. If they could fix this minor issue, then it would be perfectly usable.

[OfficialPixelBrush]

Any news on this end?

[mfreeman72]

As far as I know, per comments above, this is not being worked on, so it's in limbo until the devs decide it's worth looking at. It would be awesome if I had better news, but sadly I don't.

[echuber2]

Is there still an active PR with some work done? I thought I had looked at one that did an iterative box blur and I thought, it might be more performant to do a separable gaussian blur.