This chapter describes which parameters you can tweak, how they will result visually and their performance impact.
A translucent object is one that allows light to pass through it. In terms of windows on your desktop, that means that the contents of windows can be seen through the one on the top.
Translucency allows you to emphasize special windows, have a 3 dimensional view on your desktop, keep track of covered windows, and just looks cute. The price is, that blending things together costs some system capacity.
You can independently configure translucency for the following items:
It is suggested you deactivate translucency for the active window. The main reason is for perfomance, and secondly because to scan the content of a translucent window means your brain has to strip the irritating throughshining information, which is tiring.
If you set inactive windows translucent, active windows will appear emphasized and are easier to focus. However, if you choose a lower value, you may have trouble to find an inactive window. If you choose very low values (< 20%) you may not be able to distinguish windows in their stack order - so you may accidently click the button of a dialog when you just wanted to activate a window. Optimal values are between 60% and 80%.
Though it's a nice effect to have heavily translucent (opacity < 20%) moving windows, there is a heavy price to pay in performance, especially if you do not deactivate shadows (see below). Just try out and if you feel your system is too slow, keep moving windows opaque. This value also applies to windows in resize state.
As docks like kicker are seldom if ever moved and usually of limited size, this is purely visual and won't detrimentally affect your system's performance.
If you set a window to keep above others, you usually want to keep focus on it, so it can make sense to give it the same emphasis.
XRender supports windows with an alpha mask, i.e. translucent sections. Currently there are no or only very few applications that would make use of this feature, as it doesn't make any sense without using a composite manager. This may change in the future.
On the other side, most gtk 1.x applications (e.g. xmms) set such an alpha mask, resulting in almost unusable windows (as long as the sublying windows are not black), so you can disable the support for ARGB windows here to make use of gtk applications. There will hopefully be a patch for gtk in the near future to fix this.
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