The VideoLAN Forums

Since someone locked the previous thread without any reason, here it is again.

When using VLC with a skin, KWin doesn't drop a shadow under the window, and generally doesn't seem to treat VLC as a normal window. Is there a way around that? The current handling deviates from how other windows behave (no shadows, no translucency when moving the window, snap-to-borders doesn't work the same way as other KDE windows, etc.)

I'm on KDE 4.5, Qt 4.7.0_beta2.

Someone replied that is because VLC is not a KDE program. I should mention that this shouldn't matter actually, because the window manager is its own entity, separate from the DE, and it works all the same regardless whether the application is Gnome, KDE, Motif, or whatever, since it's managed (well, should be managed) by the Window manager through a DE-agnostic API. What I'm after is whether this is a problem with VLC, KWin, or perhaps both.

Complain to Kwin people.

I'm not complaining about anything. I'm only trying to make the problem known and hopefully find out what's causing it. I also filed a bug on bugs.kde.org:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246464

Can anyone actually confirm this? Or if not, do compositing effects work correctly with other window managers?

Windows Managers can display any X11 applications, but applications can provide more or less additional information to help the WM take the right decision (either through the use of the EWMH spec or even legacy properties). Qt4 applications and KDE applications provide built-in properties or features that make them ready for a good KWin integration.

For vlc, there are two GUI interfaces on Linux :
- one written with qt4 (a lot of these properties are taken care of by the library)
- one written with directly with xlib (skins interface) (it is more basic and WM-agnostic, though there are some improvement in vlc1.1.x with the use of a few EWMH properties)

Erwan10