None of the windows have drop shadows

enc0re

@edwardp You completelly misunderstood point here. We are talking about missing shadows on Vivaldi app, not on other KDE apps.

Of course all other KDE applications have visible shadows. Only Vivaldi doesn't have shadows, but only on KDE environemnt. Under GNOME they are visible.

Please make a screenshot of Vivaldi window, not Konsole, KDE Settings or any other application.

edit:

edwardp

There is shadowing (changed to a lighter desktop wallpaper, so it can be seen).

andrejpetrovic

I have been frustrated by this for a while, but it's not just Vivaldi and I don't think there's much that Vivaldi could (or should) do. According to the discussion here, in KDE, you can't get shadows without bring along the whole title bar and all other decorations. That's why if you enable the native window style in Vivaldi, you get the drop shadow as well as the native titlebar and buttons.

There is a manual workaround you can set on an app-by-app basis (instructions for Plasma 6, for Plasma 5 it should be similar). It works for other programs that suffer from this too (VSCode and Obsidian in my case):

In KDE Settings, go to Appearance & Style → Colors & Themes → Window Decorations → Click the edit button (pencil) on in the corner of Breeze → Window-Specific Overrides tab → Add. Click "Detect Window Properties" and then the Vivaldi window. Check "Hide window title bar" and "Border Size" and select "No Border" and then OK. In Plasma 6, I also found it necessary to go to the "Shadows and Outlines" tab in the Breeze settings window and set "Outline intensity" to Off.
Back in the main KDE Settings menu, go to Apps & Windows → Window Management → Window Rules. Click "Add New", then "Detect Window Properties" and select the Vivaldi window. Choose "Window class (application)" as the window matching rule. Next, click "Add Property" at the bottom, select for "No titlebar and frame", then choose "Force" and "No" for that new entry. Apply and all should look well.

This problem is hard to search for online so I hope by writing it here it helps someone. I was hoping Plasma 6 would fix this but I guess not.

npro

@andrejpetrovic said in None of the windows have drop shadows:

have been frustrated by this for a while, but it's not just Vivaldi and I don't think there's much that Vivaldi could (or should) do. According to the discussion here, in KDE, you can't get shadows without bring along the whole title bar and all other decorations. That's why if you enable the native window style in Vivaldi, you get the drop shadow as well as the native titlebar and buttons.

I was hoping Plasma 6 would fix this but I guess not.

That's not KDE's problem but damned "Electron & Electron-like" programs', written with (the damned) "web-technologies" which require (damned) CSD "hacks" to display fake buttons, fake title-bars, shadows, etc, see my first post for the story behind it.

In this case Vivaldi using an "electron-like" UI should provide those shadows itself if not run with the native window, it's simple as that.

enc0re

@edwardp You are using "Native window". You could wrote that earlier. Issue is with missing shadows while not using "Native window".

enc0re

This post is deleted!

luetage

@npro For a browser and email programs Electron is less of an offense. Other electron apps load the engine just for the UI, in Vivaldi the engine is needed for webpage and mail rendering. We can’t know whether Vivaldi would have made it by writing native apps, the team was very small in the beginning. Maybe a Linux version would have taken years for a release. The web UI has its upsides too, for example the casual way in which we can mod the application.

enc0re

@andrejpetrovic Unfortunately that works only on Plasma 6. At least on my Debian 12 Plasma 5, Window Decorations have no effect. Both rules have no effect.

npro

@luetage said in None of the windows have drop shadows:

We can’t know whether Vivaldi would have made it by writing native apps

That's true.

enc0re

Observation. Mentioned steps for enabling window shadows works only if Vivaldi flag "Preferred Ozone platform" is Default, which isX11. If it is set to Wayland, then this workaround is not working.
However if flag is Default, then typing text in Vivaldi randomly starts to be delayed.
Ridiculous.

z428

Coming from the future, this is how Vivaldi looks on Fedora 42 with Wayland enabled:

No screen border, no shadow and somehow this feels unfinished. Did set Preferred Ozone Platform to Wayland to avoid fonts being blurred and crappy on my device, but in this case (GNOME desktop) I cannot make use of Native Window decoration either. Any recommended way to add a border in this case?
Thanks very much!

(Edit for clarity: There's a white window behind the Vivaldi window...)

mib2berlin

@z428
Hi, the same in KDE, Vivaldi doesn't use system windows, it use it's own.
You can enable Nativ Window, then it use the DE window decoration.

Some users don't like the extra space even all other apps have it either.
I use a darker theme so I don't need it at all.

Cheers, mib

z428

@mib2berlin Thanks... Yeah tried that too but it looks like a visual abhorrence on GNOME...

... maybe I need to reconsider KDE again. Somehow this seems to all have turned considerably messy the last couple of years.

mib2berlin

@z428
Yes, this looks really ugly.
I tried Gnome many times over the Years but never understand why users use it.

z428

@mib2berlin Ah yeah that's a tough topic. I'm a nerd for visual stuff and KDE cuts my fingers and eyes every other day with what feels like a myriad of minor and irrelevant annoyances - like odd font sizes, weird word wraps, too many font faces, weird alignments of controls and dialogs (just looking at KDE control center where every other panel looks and feels completely different) and it feels like choosing between GNOME with a limited set of features and some annoyances like this - and KDE which seems just missing a lot of love for this kind of polish (or maybe skill/talent/desire to fix obvious "flaws"). But guess that's off topic here...

mib2berlin

@z428
Hm, checked Plasma/KDE 6? They spend a lot in fine tuning.
On the other side we had users change browsers because of a small line under the address bar.
Vivaldi with native window look good in KDE but I would not change my DE for it.

z428

@mib2berlin I'm usually going with KDE on my everyday working system for like six months, maybe a bit longer or less, then and now, but always somehow went back to GNOME because KDE made me just nervous and also had a bunch of more serious issues no one apparently felt like fixing (like things being a complete and utter mess using a laptop with different external displays on docking stations in different offices which drastically failed on KDE every other week, resulting in my screen setup being completely gone or fonts being unreadably small on one device while being chunky and big on the other and at some point it felt like wasting effort on something that just worked out of the box in GNOME and even with having issues reported for that, this didn't seem to have much priority to really address, rude workarounds aside, like https://discuss.kde.org/t/frustrating-issues-with-kde-not-remembering-monitor-arrangement-and-panel-settings/28621/2 ). Guess I'll try that with Plasma again at some point but I unfortunately have little hope for these things to fundamentally have improved...