registry team mailing list archive

[Rémi Denis-Courmont <remi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

How to make the tray icon transparent depends on the theme. If the tray
icon area uses a uniform background color, then the tray icon background
can simply be filled with the same color. That is what happens with
"old" desktop themes, and works in pretty much any application.

However, if the tray icon area background is _not_ uniform, then
composition is required, so that the icons are really transparent. To
that end, applications must create an X window for they tray icon, that
uses the ARGB X11 visual. Unfortunately, some applications hence fail to
do that. Instead, they use the old method and fill the background of
their tray icon with an uniform background color.

I know at least VLC and Skype fall in this category. In both cases, ARGB
visuals are disabled due to complications with video rendering, namely
the XVideo extension cannot be used with ARGB visuals. In principle,
this is not an issue: XVideo is used for the main application video
rendering window, not for the tray icon window. X11 allows an
application to use different visuals for different windows. However, to
my knowledge, the Qt4 GUI library does not expose this feature of X11,
and hence ARGB has to be disabled not just for the video widget, but for
all widgets including the tray icon.

-- 
Notification area icon wrongly rendered/uses bg_color as a background (multiple apps)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/403135
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