BeShadowed

Since the Oxygen decoration paints it's own shadows, the shadow plugin got pretty step-childed.

a) it's horribly imperformant (if I play a video it's causing ~2/3 of the kwin cpu load...)
b) it's broken with XRender & translucency
c) it could use some more options
d) The heavy exponential shadow is maybe nice, but neither realistic (real shdows cast rather sharp borders), nor effective (most of the HUGE shadow is so much translucent that you can hardly see anything of it...)

Developer comments

So I started to work on it. Not much of a help for oxygen, but most other decorations (QtCurve has deco shadows as well), consistent and (hopefully) less artefact prone.

Ultimately this should go back upstream but testing outside the release cycle won't hurt - I assume.

What is new in this release:

• git master GL support, nothing else (notice that kwin 4.7 will have a revamped shadow system anyway)

What is new in version 0.8:

• fix popup clipping when no desktop window is in use (corner case)
• fix XRender shadows for tiny windows

What is new in version 0.7:

• add property support to force shadows
• add launcher script to run chromium with this property
• add flag for translucent decorations (aurorae, oxygen) to fix "corner" artefact (will be autodetected with 4.5, but not "implemented" yet)

What is new in version 0.1:

• Version 0.1 performance is up to decoration shadows for one window (heavy repaints in a video) but doesn't scale as good, there also might be artifacts left (didn't see any though) but good enough for a first version, I hopefully can speed up things even more.

Requirements:

• KDE Plasma