Blur behind certain windows

[Danielle Foré]

We should blur behind certain windows like Docks, Panels, Menus, etc. This should probably be configurable. An array in dconf?

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Pretty much irrelevant with current opacity levels.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

GPLv3 shader for logarithmic complexity blur: http://code.google.com/p/burger-engine/source/browse/trunk/Data/Shaders/Engine/LogGaussianBlur10.frag
Haven't found any exponential blur GLSL shaders yet

[David Gomes (davidgomes)]

Daniel asked me to say this here. Well, pantheon-terminal already supports real transparency.

[Craig Weber (weberc2)]

I'm with Shnatsel. Anyway, blurring is computationally intensive from what I understand, and could take a real toll on some machines. It doesn't seem worth it for a little bit of polish, in my humble opinion. Is there a less-computationally-intensive way of incorporating a different kind of polish that would be attractive without being so functionally detrimental?

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Blurring on the GPU is not that computationally intensive (GPUs are designed for such tasks after all). Besides, it will have to be re-computed only on changes. I didn't tell you this, but right now Gala blurs the window shadow on the CPU which is not designed to handle that and you don't even notice. And that's with exponential complexity blur; logarithmic blur is cheaper.

[aggelalex (aggelalex-ppa)]

Blurring certain transparent windows is a must these days. I have a semi-transparent theme for eOS loki that if gala supported blur it would be really outstanding to watch, the OS would be a masterpiece. I suggest having a switch in the settings app that sets blur on/off, for PCs that can't handle it, but for PCs that can, it's really a shame not to have that.

The theme for those who want to test it: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxj_sjWtH-SGbHVJS05oYmJqSkE