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Bug 698544 - Background configuration is missing in terminal profile editor
Background configuration is missing in terminal profile editor
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 695371
Product: gnome-terminal
Classification: Core
Component: Profiles
3.8.x
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: GNOME Terminal Maintainers
GNOME Terminal Maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2013-04-22 07:18 UTC by Eduard Valiauka
Modified: 2017-07-14 02:24 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Demonstration why it is insufficient (688.13 KB, image/png)
2013-05-10 13:06 UTC, Tobias Wolf
Details

Description Eduard Valiauka 2013-04-22 07:18:29 UTC
Steps:

1. Open gnome terminal
2. Go to Edit -> Profile Preferences

Actual result: Background configuration tab is missing.

It was present in 3.6 version, please return it back.
Comment 1 Christian Persch 2013-04-22 09:34:26 UTC
No.
Comment 2 Eduard Valiauka 2013-04-22 09:36:15 UTC
Why?
Comment 3 piruthiviraj natarajan 2013-04-23 14:50:23 UTC
Just a No and closing it as resolved and wontfix is bad attitude.
no wonder why gnome deserves the flak.
Comment 4 Peter 2013-04-23 17:57:35 UTC
Why is this *major* feature missing?
Comment 5 Eduard Valiauka 2013-04-23 18:40:43 UTC
It is not a major missing, but having a transparent background was very convenient and I'm very used to it.
I'm just wondering why is this feature cut off and whether there are plans to return it.
Comment 6 Peter 2013-04-23 19:22:05 UTC
It is a major feature for me and every graphical terminal-emulator offers this. The complete development around compositing and AIGLX was focused on enabling real transparency, especially for terminal-emulators.

It not okay to answer with "No". It is not okay to remove such a feature silently, without discussing this in public. It not okay to put this not in the release notes of GNOME 3.8. And is not okay to destroy the great work of so many developers.

GNOME 3 is dying a little with every removed feature. But rude developers kill the community!
Comment 7 Dave Friberg 2013-04-24 04:13:20 UTC
How can we get transparent backgrounds in gnome-terminal after this change?

Surely there's still some way to do it.
Comment 8 piruthiviraj natarajan 2013-04-24 04:16:24 UTC
1.use xfce-terminal.
2.downgrade to gnome 3.6 if your OS allows it.
3.revert the commit from sources and recompile the binary.
Comment 9 Dave Friberg 2013-04-24 04:19:10 UTC
I was looking for something like this:

4.go to (gnome-automagic-profile-settings-menu-program, click background transparency button).
Comment 10 piruthiviraj natarajan 2013-04-24 04:20:24 UTC
If we had that already, this bug report won't exist.
Comment 11 Dave Friberg 2013-04-24 04:27:45 UTC
Unless Mr. Persch happens to know something we all don't.
Comment 12 Dave Friberg 2013-04-24 04:28:44 UTC
And btw, xfce-terminal seems fine.  Thanks.
Comment 13 piruthiviraj natarajan 2013-04-24 05:00:47 UTC
For the last 3 years gnome has been primarily involved in features removing  contest and they have been citing various bogus reasons and one of them is better code maintenance. This time its the terminal getting some features removed and if you see evince it has lost some features too.
Comment 14 Peter 2013-04-24 09:04:16 UTC
The general problem of GNOME:

The developers of GNOME tend to believe the project is criticized because the people doesn't like the new GNOME-SHELL. The developers think it is necessary to iron out the glitches and while GNOME3 is getting more mature, the press and user will honor the work. Smiliar to KDE4.
But the users are not criticizing the GNOME-Shell! They cirticize the removal of features with every new GNOME 3.x release-cycle. It is not getting better. It is getting worse!



Failures:
* no communication between developers and users (there is none, no official forum, no response to user critic)
* permanent removal of features
* wrong believe that removing options and features lead to a clean and well usable design of applications
* no official strategy, no official plan for features/changes for next release




Nautilus in 3.6 was a perfect example:
* The developers ignored every warning from the userbase
* They removed split-pane and find-as-you-type, and replaced the later one with a slow unintuitive search
* User left GNOME, migrated to XFCE, fork like MINT or stay with 3.4 (like Ubuntu, which is also a fork)

GNOME 3.8 has removed transparency support?
* For what reason?!

GNOME 3.0:
* removed many options, e.g. especially "LID-CLOSED" on laptops or "leaving message on login screen" or "configuration tool for gdm"

Kiding:
Will 3.10 remove tabs from Nautilus or Epiphany? Why everyone how is not familiar with dconf has to install gnome-tweak-tool?


Please. Change this development-approach.
Comment 15 piruthiviraj natarajan 2013-04-24 09:12:35 UTC
Even in this bug report, the dev was fast enough to say a "no" and close the bug. But he doesn't come to defend his decision to remove the feature if he truly believes what he done is right. Either its incredible arrogance or the dev is not physically around a computer. I expect the later even though the former option maybe true considering the recent history of "Gnome"
Comment 16 Peter 2013-04-24 11:27:00 UTC
What me frustrates, is the destrucation of working code. Writing new code is hard enough. I'm pretty sure the developer  is working hard to improve gnome-terminal. So we should work together and help, not just blame people we don't know. The developer spends his/her valueable spare-time: So I want say: Thank you!

I will try to get this better:
* We should encourge active developers to care about this and similiar things
* There is a FAQ (see last point):
https://live.gnome.org/Terminal/FAQ

--------------------------------------------
How can I make the terminal transparent?
Since version 3.7 this option has been removed from the Preferences dialogue. You can however still get the same effect by setting the _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY X property, for example with the Devil's Pie or Devil's Pie II tools. (FIXME: add detailed instructions.)
--------------------------------------------

Workaround (not a solution):
http://www.foosel.org/linux/devilspie

With devilspie it is possible to detect the gnome-terminal window and set transparency for the complete windows. So the complete application gets transparent, but it is better than noting. Example:

Save the file under ~/.devilspie/terminal.ds and use gnome-session-properties to start devilspie every time you log into GNOME. You need just the last line!

terminal.ds 
; undecorate and launch at right-bottom
(if
	(is (application_name) "Terminal")
	(begin
		(undecorate)
		; for 100x25
		(geometry "+2400+450")
		; for 115x30
		;(geometry "+425+270")
		(opacity 75)
	)
)
Comment 17 Peter 2013-04-24 11:30:54 UTC
Question:
I'm trying to find the commit message which removed the transparency option. But I don't find it, maybe I search for the wrong comment? Maybe it possible to revert the patch, but it looks like the complete UI was redesigned.

Their seems to be also an weird patch by Ubuntu!?
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+changelog
Comment 18 Dave Friberg 2013-04-25 16:51:51 UTC
Looks like that Ubuntu patch was in 3.6, and it just enabled a feature that was removed in 3.7 as far as I can tell.
Comment 25 Dave Friberg 2013-05-10 13:29:21 UTC
The screenshot is helpful -- I didn't realize that's the workaround he was suggesting.

This change might be OK if the "system theme" supported a window background opacity setting that gnome-terminal would pick up.  Although if you're getting rid of window-specific color settings I'm not really sure why the color tab still exists in gnome-terminal at all.
Comment 40 Olav Vitters 2013-05-12 11:37:46 UTC
I'm not sure what people are trying to achieve, but anyone just trolling on Bugzilla and especially this bugreport will be banned outright. We (GNOME Bugzilla admins) already gave various warnings.

Disagreeing with chpe or this decision is fine. Taking it to various forums and just trolling this bugreport is not.
Comment 43 Dan Mashal 2013-05-13 07:33:29 UTC
FWIW you can use mate-terminal as an alternative as well. Forked from gnome-terminal-2.32
Comment 45 Allan Day 2013-05-13 22:56:45 UTC
I've spoken to Christian and he has filled me in on the background to this issue.

The ability to set background transparency was removed as a part of a much larger clean up of the gnome-terminal code base. This modernisation effort is much needed and it should be remembered that the terminal has an old and complicated code base. Background transparency was also known to cause a range of performance issues, including slowness and memory leaks.

Given the number of active terminal developers, the need to clean up the code base and known bugs with background transparency, it was decided that the resources were not available to maintain background transparency and keep the quality to the required level.

We understand that some users are disappointed by the disappearance of this feature, and we hope that they understand that this decision was made to enable other improvements to the terminal code, and that it will lead to other improvements in the long run.

While Christian’s initial response could have been better, he has responded in detail in private mail and I suspect that he was simply tired of the issue.
Comment 46 Olav Vitters 2013-05-14 07:56:14 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 695371 ***
Comment 47 Denis Donici 2013-05-14 13:46:11 UTC
(In reply to comment #45)
> I've spoken to Christian and he has filled me in on the background to this
> issue.
> 
> The ability to set background transparency was removed as a part of a much
> larger clean up of the gnome-terminal code base. This modernisation effort is
> much needed and it should be remembered that the terminal has an old and
> complicated code base. Background transparency was also known to cause a range
> of performance issues, including slowness and memory leaks.
> 
> Given the number of active terminal developers, the need to clean up the code
> base and known bugs with background transparency, it was decided that the
> resources were not available to maintain background transparency and keep the
> quality to the required level.
> 
> We understand that some users are disappointed by the disappearance of this
> feature, and we hope that they understand that this decision was made to enable
> other improvements to the terminal code, and that it will lead to other
> improvements in the long run.
> 
> While Christian’s initial response could have been better, he has responded in
> detail in private mail and I suspect that he was simply tired of the issue.

Thank you Allan for detailed answer. I am sure if this was be the answer at the beginning there would be no misunderstanding. Are there any plans to implement transparency ability sometime later in gnome-terminal?
Comment 48 Peter 2013-05-15 11:36:52 UTC
Thank you Allan.
Let us solve this!

Unfortunately we are now in the situation that gnome-terminal can't compete with other state-of-the-art terminals. It is better to keep such a feature and fix the glitches, during an subsequent release. I've written about that in general on the mailing-list already.

From the quotes in bug 695371 [1] we know that Christian considered transparency as a not essential feature. The importance of a feature is defined by every single user. The point is, that every user defines what is important. And a nice looking terminal is important for a lot of people. What we can also read there is, that some problems where caused by setting an own background for the terminal not necessarily transparency.

The terminal-widget provided by VTE offers the transparency-feature. Are other terminal-emulators also affected? It is not possible for me to judge the argument about memory-leaks. The bugzilla doesn't show existing [2] reports about memory-leaks. Also I didn't suffered slowness or serious memory-leaks on my own machine. There is only and old bug about pseudo-transparency which is fixed by true-transparency, years ago.

TL,DR
Would you or Christian accept patches, which reimplemented the transparency feature? The situation has become serious. It doesn't need to end in bitterness! We can now start to learn and make things better.

There other things like removing window-borders or remembering the position of the terminal which are nice and handy. I would appreaciate the addidition of features!

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695371#c11
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=product%3A%22vte%22+

Bye
Comment 49 Peter 2013-05-15 14:10:05 UTC
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660711#c3

Honestly, that looks like a personal preference. But Christian is only "one" of "many" users.
Comment 50 Poete Zor 2013-05-15 19:42:35 UTC
I'm a long time user of this feature. I understand the point of view of Allan and Christian but I will be very happy if they  could change their mind about the removal of this feature.

We are many to like the terminal transparency and without notice issues (memory leak or what else)

So Christian, I can just say please please please.

Anyway, thank for all you are doing.
Comment 51 Allan Day 2013-05-15 21:51:25 UTC
Please remember that a bug tracker is a development tool and not a forum. If you have substantive information regarding the issue at hand, such as use cases or technical arguments, please make them. However, we do ask everyone to refrain from providing personal opinions alone. Development tools need to have a high signal to noise ratio in order to be effective!
Comment 52 Peter 2013-05-16 08:51:41 UTC
GNOME doesn't provide a forum.
Comment 53 André Klapper 2013-05-16 10:09:58 UTC
There is: http://forums.worldofgnome.org/
Comment 54 Peter 2013-05-16 10:48:19 UTC
Not official.
Comment 55 Allan Day 2013-05-16 10:58:25 UTC
(In reply to comment #54)
> Not official.

Peter, there are plenty of places for informal discussion with GNOME contributors, and we have heard you.

Bugzilla is not the place for this.
Comment 56 Olav Vitters 2013-05-16 13:17:53 UTC
Anyway, this bug is resolved as duplicate. There was a bit of useful bits, like a question if a patch would be welcome. That at least would be interesting to know and is relevant.

Suggest either asking chpe directly (to check if it is ok), or just opening a new bug and attaching the patch. You might want to talk to a designer though.
Comment 57 Peter 2013-10-08 01:06:53 UTC
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2013-July/msg08351.html

Christian Persch has deprecated "vte_terminal_set_opacity()" and other similiar functions. VTE is not GNOME-TERMINAL, it is a public library which is used by many other terminal-emulators. It should maintained like a public library, not like internal code of an application.

Sorry. Is this the way how GNOME works?
Comment 58 Alberto Salvia Novella 2017-07-14 02:24:12 UTC
Transparency in Terminal adds no practical or aesthetic usefulness to the application.

On the other hand it's important to communicate that to people, so you show it's not about taste but of priorities.