ALT+TAB with compiz shows really ugly icons for minimized windows

i confirm, this is a really ugly behaviour. i made a screenshot too

Even worse is when you press Super+Tab while apps are minimized. The icon appear really big on the screen but their resolutions are horrible.

I've found a related upstream bug and discussion:

 * http://bugs.opencompositing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1130
 * http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=7873

So there is a relatively straightforward and incremental way to fix this issue. I will outline the steps here.

1) Patch compiz to pay attention to things like _NET_WM_ICON_NAME (if it doesn't already) as well as to use a simple heuristic to look at the size of the icon it wants and some of the other properties of the minimized window, such as its class name, which often matches its desired icon name (e.g. firefox)

2) Patch GTK+ to set more than one icon size into _NET_WM_ICON, preferably setting some large size icons in there for these use cases.

3) Patch compiz, if needed, to play nice with 2)

Up to this point these are temporary solutions, ultimately it would be best to match a window with a .desktop file in a reliable way. In the future this will be possible and when it is all compiz must do is load the icon from the desktop file and be done.

There has been a new idea >
https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/402821
It sounds better to show the window preview always, than showing an icon.

I am pretty damn sure that this is and icon theme issue. Using old. incomplete Human icon theme displays blurry icons on many places, not only int Alt+Tab switcher. Try icon theme GNOME-Human from gnome-colors suite where are all icons in all sizes, including scalable version and you will never have this problem again..

Icons are ugly even using that theme (and BTW, I have been using it for a long time).

I am pretty damn sure that this is *NOT* an icon theme issue :)

Try by yourself, I won't attach another screenshot because it would be identical to the one i have attached in the post #2.

I have this problem with EVERY icon set of the default ubuntu installation, and also with EVERY download theme (gnome-colors too).

This is a matter of the apps not shipping icons which are large enough / scalable for compiz to show it decently. The human theme purposely does not ship with app icons, in order for apps to brand themselves as they see fit. It is not an error in the human theme. Albeit, including a fall-back theme with nice icons for apps, such as humanity is perhaps a really good idea ;)

perhaps, a solution could be to always show the icon in the original size: i prefer see an icon of 32x32 in middle of a rectangle of 128x128 (guessing here) instead of an icon of 32px stretched to fit in the rectangle.

The icon for smplayer display correctly (48px) as you will see in the image, not for nautilus, firefox, etc.

Invalid as a papercut, since there is no simple fix for this[Pls read Kenneth's comment and the compiz links in David's comment]

Simply showing an icon of a minimized window is not the solution.
-the preview of the window needs to be displayed ,only then the widows are actually previewed.

But assigning this bug to ayatana , so that an elegant solution is brought about...
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=7873&page=5

Won't Fix in papercuts , but is tagged "ayatana" to be overseen in Ayatana project

The aesthetic usability of Ubuntu is impaired by this bug.

Please can someone attend to it? Reading the comments there appear to be simple ways to fix this but I am not in a position to judge.

Thanks!

It seems this was fixed with the new compiz settings that hit lucid some weeks ago. Now the alt-tab switcher has thumbnails of the actual windows, plus a non-scaled/non-fuzzy icon in the lower right corner.

the issue is happening with minized dialogs not the ones open on screen

I wouldn't say that the importance of this bug is "low", especially given the fact that I don't think it's extremely hard to solve... anyway, I'm "affected" too, and would really like to know if there's a possible workaround for it.

I think minimised windows should still appear with a preview and an icon in the bottom right corner. This would put less importance on difficulties super-sizing the icons (more difficult) and should make it a much easier issue to fix.

Retaining a live preview of the window requires fundamentally changing how compiz handles minimized windows. There was a point where compiz did this, however it was removed due to memory usage constraints. Retaining a static preview is also possible, again with additional memory consumption. Neither of these are simpler to solve than getting a higher quality icon however.

As far as I know, minimized windows cannot be rendered as thumbnails without fundamental changes to Compiz or even deeper down the windowing stack.

Let's just do what we can to match windows with appropriately sized icons for Maverick, without any other fundamental changes to the switcher behavior because with Compiz++ on the way, our changes will likely be deprecated anyway. A patch that uses BAMF will likely be forward-compatible as well.

What about an empty 'default' window rather than a live preview? I agree that the best solution is higher quality icons but that's currently a far-reaching problem...

This should probably be fixed when compiz 0.9.2 lands.. whenever that is ;-)
Quoting from:
<http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/compiz-showcase-whats-coming-up-in-0-9-2/>
"Minimized Window Previews

As stated in a blog post before, in Compiz 0.9.2 it will be possible to have minimized window previews. Just check the appropriate box in the workarounds plugin and it will be handled in all plugins automatically."

At the very least, the preview should show the ratio of the minimised window as a box (Otto, comment #22). But really a representation of the window needs cacheing before it is destroyed. Bear in mind that if the user alt-tabs past that minimised window even for a second then it *is* going to be raised anyway and redrawn at that point, then scaled, then... (all of which has considerably higher-latency).

On the icon-scaling front, I don't think the huge icons help much. The huge icons are too big to be useful, and the small corner icons are too _small_ to be quickly visibly useful; but either way they also should be drawn from the show and not a rescaling of a fixed bitmap rendering (Minimising Firefox still shows this).

All in all this definitely requires some design. The alt-tab revamp was planned around a2-a3 at UDS. So i'm putting that on the Design radar for now and will wait for design hand over to put that back on the unity engineering task list.

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You can change that in the settings to use the "best quality icons" in
Compiz. Although even if you do use that; the iconset might be a bit off.

And it depends what you have set for Alt+TAB; currently I have the Shift
switcher configured.

On 02/21/2011 02:47 AM, Martin Pitt wrote:
> ** Changed in: compiz (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: Canonical Desktop Team (canonical-desktop-team) => (unassigned)
>

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Braindumping here.

In theory to follow the EWMH, applications should just set larger icon sizes in _NET_WM_ICON. It's not that hard to do and saves us the pain of application matching.

In reality, applications are stupid and for the O cycle it would be best to overload GLWindow::getIcon with another method provided by some kind of "bamficon" plugin to get the icon and display a nicer hi-res one.

Can we use resized icons for the major apps ahead of fixing the more gnarly problem of not snapshotting minimized apps - Libreoffice, FF, Chrome, Empathy icons alone would offer very significant polish to Ubuntu

CK

Chris: for clarity, are you thinking rescaled icons (to avoid a size difference), or ensuring that we actually have redrawn 128x128 (or whatever) icons specifically at that size.

Either is considerably better than what we have so whatever we can fit into Natty :-).

Sam: how much would it be to just draw icons at their native size. Eg. if the source icon is 32x32 or 48x48 and the available viewport is 128x128 we just draw it tiny in the middle?

I think the objection here is the scaling (+ resulting jaggies) itself.

This bug is fixed in Unity with the new alt-tab design implementation.

This is not fixed! What about us who like the old alt-tab (static application switcher plugin) behavior which actually allows the use of the mouse to select applications?